Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to the 1970 graduating class of Bennington College:

"Everything is going to become unimaginably worse and never get better again."

"A state of confusion." -- John Wayne Gacy, in response to a police question about which US state he was born in.

.......................................



the wisdom of detective Charlie Chan:




"Waiting for tomorrow waste of today.”


“Mind like parachute - only function when open.”


“Long journey always start with one short step.”


“Optimist only sees doughnut. Pessimist sees hole.”


“Front seldom tell truth. To know occupants of house, always look in backyard.”


“If you want wild bird to sing do not put him in cage.”


“Suspicion often father of truth.”


“Journey of life like feather in stream - must go with current.”


"Madness twin brother of genius because each live in world created by own ego. One sometimes mistaken for the other."


“One grain of luck sometimes worth more than whole rice field of wisdom.”

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
-Franz Kafka

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
-Franz Kafka

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress
here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire
life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your
time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
-Dostoevsky

"What do you consider the most humane? - To spare someone shame.
What is the seal of liberation? - To no longer be ashamed in front of
oneself."
-Nietzsche

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound.
-Nietzsche

The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.
-Nietzsche

"I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me - is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.
-Albert Schweitzer

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
-Albert Schweitzer

Everything can change in our demoralised world, with the exception of the heart, the love of man and his desire to know the divine.
-Marc Chagall

Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings.
-Heraclitus

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
-Carl Jung

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not
what I must know...What matters is to find a purpose...to find a truth
that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live
and die...This is what my soul thirsts for as the African desert
thirsts fo water.
-Kierkegaard

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!
-Eugene O'Neil

.........................

the boy asks:


Dad, how long did it take you to learn poker?


Dad replies:


All my life son

Not sure, but didn't see these lot posted. Suprised, I may have missed it, but didn't Churchill's. He's up there with Oscsr Wilde, Shakespeare and co.

“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
“No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.”

His social ones are are great too:

'When accused by one of them of being 'disgustingly drunk' the Conservative Prime Minister responded: 'My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.'

Meh he's got hundreds more. You can pass him off as an old fashioned racist misogynistic, but he knew his good.

Some biased (my great grand dad wrote them) ones by me I felt were relevant to now.
“There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.”
“She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.”
“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
“We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”
“Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”

Springsteen “Mary Queen of Arkansas “
I don’t know how you can hold me so tight and love me so loose

Ricky Gervais
“Dying is like being stupid, it’s only painful for others”

Dolly Parton
“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap “

Lifes a ***** and then you marry one.

Don't know who coined this but it could be all the way from Don Rickles to Rodney Dangerfield. Or maybe it was me. lol.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship. - Zeuxis

J. B. Priestley was your great granddad?

Yeh unfortunately I can't write. Do have his love of the theme of time though, although plays make me nervous that the actor's going to forget their lines.

and then you die................

Two quotes by Rod Stewart on marriage

“I’ve never been more in love with anyone nearly half my age than I am today. I'd get married in a minute if I weren't still married to somebody else.”

“Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house.“

...........................



everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face


Mike Tyson

“...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace

DFW

.....................

"when one person suffers from a delusion it's called insanity

when many people suffer from a delusion it's called religion"






Robert M. Pirsig

i've always appreciated zen, but i've never been able to maintain a motorcycle.

Eliot sums up humanity
Every case is unique, but very similar to others

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

Maybe someone has a tip for me, which books I could now enjoy, after just having finished reading "The Pale King" from DFW, which at least wasn't easy at all...? (after all others, which actually are very enjoyable for me!)

......................

I'm not a commie by any means
but I've got to admit.....................whoa........the man could write



Karl Marx on capitalism - he wrote it is:




"half lamentation

half lampoon

half echo of the past

half threat to the future"

“There are only two types of music, good and bad”
Duke Ellington