“Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quo!
So little time! So much to know!”
– Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.
Tag: Quotables
Illustrative things said by people other than me. Think of them as pieces of congealed wonder and wisdom.
Like A Man
“And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering, and I shall steel it to endure that too. … So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.”
— Odysseus, in Homer’s The Odyssey (E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation)
Convergence
“In science truth is always our goal but rarely our attainment. We move from error toward truth by successive approximations. Just as parallel lines are said to meet at infinity, we, as the human race, might expect to arrive at absolute truth only if given infinite time in which to flounder intelligently.”
— E.H. Cherrington Jr, Exploring the Moon Through Binoculars and Small Telescopes
My Mind to Your Mind, Your Cache to My Cache
IF YOU DIG observational whimsy parceled into 15-second packets (more or less), I’d take it as a kindness if you dialed into my podcast: Short Attention Span Wisdoms, also available on a dozen of your favorite podcasting platforms including Spotify, iHeart Radio, Deezer, and Amazon Music/Audible. Enlightenment optional; grokking guaranteed.
Pithyism #26a-z
WHEN WORDS ENTER the picture, experience goes right out the window.
Eyes Above
“The longer I spend in this hobby, the more convinced I become that astronomy isn’t about checking objects off a list. It’s about slowing down long enough to truly appreciate what’s already waiting overhead.”
-Mike from Astronomics
Ponderness
“ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE is not evidence of absence.”
– some wise soul or other
The Way It Works
“For Jews, reflection and renewal … are elicited through text study. Our most enduring words do not simply remind us of who we once aspired to be; they press us to ask how well we have lived up to them and how they might yet speak with urgency in our own time.”
– Rabbi Leon A. Morris, Talmud of America
What It’s All About
“Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand…”
–Robert Hunter
Arms Call
“Don’t spectate: CREATE!”
–Barbatus the Elder
Ageless Speech
SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.
XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
Who Knows?
“Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear?”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu