Maggie's Farm

Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. Tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.

Steve Sabol, via Driscoll

"Accept loneliness as normal, merely a sign that action is required."

Limon (I have no idea who Limon is) - h/t Vanderleun

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen."

George MacDonald (H/t Vanderleun)

"Nobody ever thinks they're stupid. It's part of the stupidity."

Detective Ray Cole, interrogating Preston 'Bodie' Broadus, The Wire: Season 2, episode 9, via Dr X's Dunning-Kruger in Popular Culture

“As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn

“If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking.”

Gen. George Patton, via Schneiderman's Has Obama Lost Tina Brown?

"HELL AND DAMNATION, is all I can say. WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY? But I can’t think of doing anything else, can you?"

Julia Child, entrepreneur

The redneck's last words:

"Hey, y'all - watch this!"

A reader offers this variation on the theme: "Hey, y'all. Hold my beer and watch this!"

“. . . let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (h/t Anchoress)

h/t Brain Pickings:

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. [Studies permeate and shape manners.] Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study 197 the lawyers’ cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”

Thomas Jefferson, via The lamps are going out

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud

"I never remember a face."

A friend of mine

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.

Robert Frost

More, at Sipp

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”

G K Chesterton, Broadcast talk 6-11-35, via Anchoress' Chesterton and Lewis on the Tyranny of Bloomberg

"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

Michel de Montaigne

The problem with reality is that it doesn’t care what you believe.

Q&O

"This pudding lacks a theme."

Winston Churchill. (Sometimes I think that could apply to Maggie's Farm.)

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Albert Einstein

If you torture the data enough, they will confess anything.

A commonly-used variation on Ronald Coase's aphorism.