By parading a stream of other people’s lives in front of us, [television / computer / cinema] screens remove the responsibility to create our own lives. We watch other people doing things instead of doing them ourselves.
Quotes
I’m experimenting with the idea of using my blog as sort of a modern version of a commonplace book. If I come across something I like in a book I’m reading, I’ll quote it here.
William Cobbett on the relative value of bacon and religion
QuoteA couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts,”
–William Cobbett
E. H. (Elmer Harry) Kreps on Union County, Pennsylvania
QuoteI was born and grew to manhood in one of the wildest and roughest districts of Pennsylvania
— E. H. (Elmer Harry) Kreps on Union County
Emerson
QuoteGod will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
H. L. Mencken on Medicine
Quote“The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.”
— H. L. Mencken
Bertrand Russell on Pythagoras
QuoteHe founded a religion, of which the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans.
— Bertrand Russell on Pythagoras
impassioned gibberish
QuoteFlushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Washington Irving
QuoteI profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.
— Washington Irving