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Quote of the day

 
steward
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"We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba." - Kurt Vonnegut , from "Cats Cradle"
 
steward
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Ahh, wayne. That is one of my favorites!! I loved Cat's Cradle.

So.... this next one I have is from a movie, Lone Survivor that I actually haven't even seen but one of my friends quoted in her blog the other day and it just really resonated with me. Especially the last few sentences.

“…There ain’t nothing I can’t do. No sky too high, no sea too rough… Learned a lot of lessons in my life. Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing. Moderation is for cowards. I’m a lover. I’m a fighter…” – a UDT Navy Seal diver
 
wayne stephen
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"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." - Douglas Adams
 
steward
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In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

Frantz Fanon
 
Cassie Langstraat
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"Surround yourself with people who make you hungry for life, touch your heart, and nourish your soul." - Unknown

 
pollinator
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A rising tide floats ALL boats ! It is very hard to put a negative spin on this one, and i often use it to a Thread Extension, especially when someone
is a little enthusive with praise or thanks, it reminds people that we are all a community here at Permies.com ! Big AL
 
wayne stephen
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"Destroying rain forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal." - E.O. Wilson
 
Cassie Langstraat
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"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
 
pollinator
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And one for pure entertainment value, straight from the mouth of my two year old son.

Context; walking through the bra section of the lingeree department of Debenham while on a clothes shopping trip.

Philip (very loudly) 'They got milks. Mummy don't need to buy milks. Mummy got her own milks,'



Don't take life too seriously, and remember to smile.
 
wayne stephen
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"I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle." - Kurt Vonnegut

This sums it up for me . This is why I have contributed regularly to "Quote of the Day" and "Thought of the Day" . I have utilized quotations from various thinkers as a daily devotional for years . The internet has allowed me to peruse my choices and select at whim as opposed to buying one of those devotional calendars . At least , I am at whim to my own train of thought and not another persons .
 
Cassie Langstraat
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Wayne that is SUCH a good one by vonnegut. I couldn't agree more. Like I said in my original post, it is super important to me to be able to think for oneself but immersing yourself in the wisdom of others is so enriching too.. I'm glad you have been a regular contributor to this thread.
 
pollinator
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More from the very deep well that is Wendell Berry:

“Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”

“Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial.”

“The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be in earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants. To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also against those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”

 
wayne stephen
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“Chances are, when you were young, you were told, in effect, "Listen, kid, here is the news: life is not about you. Life is not about what you want. What you want is not important. Life is about doing what others expect of you." If you accepted this idea, later on you wondered what had happened to your fire. Where had your enthusiasm for living gone?” ― Nathaniel Branden
 
Cassie Langstraat
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Thought this one was interesting.

"We are all just human, tiny specks of light and magic. Yet we Carry around hearts and potential to love like gods." Anita Krizzan
 
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"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance"
-- e.e. cummings
 
Mountain Krauss
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"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
--David Foster Wallace
 
Cassie Langstraat
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Bringin out e.e.cummings AND David Foster Wallace in one day? Woo, you must have seen into my soul my friend. I love those two writers very very much.
 
wayne stephen
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"There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason." - John Locke
 
Cassie Langstraat
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I just had to follow the David Foster Wallace strain. When I graduated from university with an English degree, one of my professors gave me the book This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace. It is filled with brilliant insight but this quote is what it comes down to. So this one is a shout out to all my liberal arts folks.

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”

- David Foster Wallace

It sounds kind of depressing, but I love it.
 
Mountain Krauss
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"She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way."
--David Foster Wallace

I love how well DFW's quotes apply to permaculture.

In an unrelated note, David Foster Wallace quoted e.e. cummings in his novel Infinite Jest-- a couple lines from a cummings poem were the text within a tattoo sported by one of the minor characters.
 
Cassie Langstraat
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Mountain Krauss wrote:
In an unrelated note, David Foster Wallace quoted e.e. cummings in his novel Infinite Jest-- a couple lines from a cummings poem were the text within a tattoo sported by one of the minor characters.



Nice catch! Infinite Jest is on my christmas list. Yes, I am a grown woman and still have a christmas list. I prefer getting books I want for christmas rather than my family members wasting their money on worthless things that they just got me because they felt they had to get me something!

 
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"an economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent and war is it's inevitable out come. We need a peacable economy" Wendell Berry

one of my heros:)
 
Judith Browning
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the gun thread discussion lead my husband to remind me of this from the TAO TE CHING...

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 31

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.


(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 
Cassie Langstraat
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Franz Kafka is one of my other favorite writers. I am beginning to realize I probably have too many to call them favorites but oh well.. Anyways, his writing is just so dark and real and raw, it is truly enchanting..

“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka
 
Cassie Langstraat
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AND, in honor of bell hooks on her birthday,

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.” - bell hooks
 
Dan Grubbs
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Excerpt from an interview of Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute.

Interviewer: You have one quote that, I swear, kind of left me a little cold, “farming is humanity's original sin.” What do you mean by that?

Wes Jackson: Well, let’s think what those ecosystems were like 10,000 years ago. Almost everywhere nature features perennials grown in mixtures – whether we're talking about a tropical rain forest, desert scrub or alpine meadow. In order to grow the annual grain, you have to have a seedbed in which seed can germinate. That means that you have to essentially destroy the vegetative structure of what was there. And that introduces the idea that nature is to be subdued or ignored. That’s also the beginning of soil erosion. And so soil erosion on a global scale is not at all trivial. And I also said another place, that “the plow share has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword…”

 
wayne stephen
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"Happiness is doing it rotten your own way." - Isaac Asimov
 
Cassie Langstraat
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I've always liked this one:

"You don't have a soul.
You are a soul.
You have a body."

- C.S. Lewis
 
wayne stephen
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"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." - Thomas Jefferson
 
wayne stephen
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"Well, in some ways we’re not successful at all. We’re destroying our home. That’s not a bit successful. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest,living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment." - Jane Goodall

In response to: "If chimps are so much like us, why are they endangered while humans dominate the globe?" Discover Magazine interview, Wednesday, March 28, 2007 with Virginia Morell
 
Cassie Langstraat
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"Words are scared. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. " - Tom Stoppard
 
steward
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I like this one from former president Truman:

If you want a friend in Washington (D.C.), get a dog.
 
wayne stephen
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"Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature." - Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia has a knack for pissing off almost everyone - male or female. For some reason she always makes me smile.
 
Cassie Langstraat
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“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” - Cynthia Occelli
 
wayne stephen
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"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards." - Edward Abbey
 
Cassie Langstraat
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“My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.”
-Peter Golkin
 
wayne stephen
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"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book." - Groucho Marx
 
John Polk
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As Mark Twain said:
If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed.
If you do read it, you are misinformed.

 
Judith Browning
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another Groucho...on my husband's favorite t-shirt...........

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx

 
I was born with webbed fish toes. This tiny ad is my only friend:
the permaculture bootcamp in winter (plus half-assed holidays)
https://permies.com/t/149839/permaculture-projects/permaculture-bootcamp-winter-assed-holidays
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