My Word Attic Updated Monday, July 30, 2001

Isn’t the Web a wonderful place to keep stuff? Who needs an attic? This is my word attic. Here I put words I don’t know what to do with. Can’t throw them away. Sometimes I have no idea who wrote them. If you know, lemmeknow .

“Hay que dar vida a los años mas que años a la vida.”

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“He who goes furthest is the man who does not know where he is going at all.” ~Oliver Cromwell

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“The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

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“Hard enough that it energizes; not so hard that it paralyzes.”

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“Education is the only business in which the clients want the least for their money.” ~David Perlmutter, Associate Professor, LSU.

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“What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.” ~ Thomas Kuhn, 1970.

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“Scientia dependit in mores” (knowledge works its way into habits).

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The fish will be the last to discover water. ~ Albert Einstein

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As they drive down a highway, novice drivers have a tendency to focus their vision on the spot of road closest to the hood of the car. That’s because they try to align the left front corner of the hood with the center stripes of the highway. It was very difficult for both my kids to learn to focus on the horizon instead of on the oncoming stripes. At first, they said they couldn’t keep the car straight if they didn’t carefully concentrate on aligning hood with stripe. Of course, they soon realized that this narrowness of vision prevented them from seeing not only what was around them but, more important, what was ahead.

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Although “there are things that we cannot know for sure, we can still observe phenomena and attempt to build a model that conforms to observations, as long as we allow that any model we construct is by definition incomplete. In fact, this is a condition that we should seek after – precisely because the circumscription of the domain of reason leaves “room” for “gaps” in thought. Where systems can not be completely known, they cannot be completely controlled. ~ Tailhard de Chardin

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“It’s no man’s business whether he has genius or not; work he must whatever he is but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will be the things he was meant to do and will be his best. No agonies or heart-renderings will enable him to do any better; if he be a great man they be great things; if a small man, small things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.” ~ Ruskin

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“The dialectic between observational data and theoretical frameworks is crucial to the working scientist. If the scientist only makes observations, he or she may be a keen observer or a naturalist, but will not have entered fully into scientific practice. That is because observations can focus on an infinite number of details culled for a variety of unspecified ends. Indeed, all of us make observations all the time, and yet few of us are practicing scientists” ~ Howard Gardner

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“We must place ourselves inside the heads of our students and try to understand as far as possible the sources and strengths of their conceptions.” ~Howard Gardner, from The Unschooled Mind

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“Tyrants put the novelists and poets in jail first.” ~Jerome Bruner

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“We don’t change, we just become more so.”

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“When men are first thrown into prison, they recoil at the sight of a rat. In time, they grow accustomed to them. Often, they make pets of them.”

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“Our lives are defined by the stories we retain. Our behavior is designed by the stories that we tell.”

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“Such are my beliefs. Such am I.” ~ Rousseau

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“As man believes, so he is. All actions that we take in life, except for instinctive acts, are based on certain conscious and unconscious beliefs and presuppositions. Consequently, it is important that we understand the relationship between our actions and our beliefs.” ~ Bhagaved Gita

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“A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.” ~ David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.

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“Ain’t it funny how you’re walking through life and it turns on a dime?” ~ Vonda Shepard

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“Without problems to extend the limits of your ability, you cannot expand . . . “

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“Only the wounded doctor can heal.” ~ Carl Jung

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“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius … A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” ~ Emerson

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“When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” ~Adrienne Rich

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“We are now in the age of cafeteria style theorizing in which constructs are plucked from divergent theories and strung together in various combinations as alternative conceptual schemes in the name of theoretical integration.” ~ Albert Bandura, 1997, p. 285.

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“It’s not the elegance of the idea. It’s the conviction with which we go after it.”

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“Truths are only universal to those who have been around long enough to experience a substantial portion of the universe.” ~ Gore Vidal

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“Perceptions are guided by preconceptions. Observers’ cognitive competencies and perceptual sets dispose them to look for some things but not others. Their expectations not only channel what they look for but partly affect what features they extract from observations and how they interpret what they see and hear.” ~ Albert Bandura, 1986, p. 53.

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“The obvious is always least understood.” ~ Prince Metternich

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ Albert Einstein

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“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.” ~ Alexandre Dumas

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“To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.” ~Freud

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“I do about five versions of everything I write. Sometimes I try to cheat and stop at four. But it doesn’t work.” ~ Gore Vidal

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“Wait and hope.” ~ Alexandre Dumas, from The Count of Monte Cristo

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“Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” ~ Basil King … or is it Goethe?

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“Gatsby believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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i met a genius

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.

it was the first time I’d realized that.

~Charles Bukowski

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In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost.

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cause and effect

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

~Charles Bukowski

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the aliens

you may not believe it but there are people who go through life with very little friction or distress. they dress well, eat well, sleep well. they are contented with their family life. they have moments of grief but all in all they are undisturbed and often feel very good. and when they die it is an easy death, usually in their sleep.

you may not believe it but such people do exist.

but I am not one of them. oh no, I am not one of them, I am not even near to being one of them

but they are there

and I am here.

~Charles Bukowski

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“I don’t know if the sky has darkened or if the night is within me while I speak to you. But like a dream, the most real dream, the only real one, my voice comes, saying that there are only two possibilities for me: either I suffer your pain with you, or I’ll suffer it without you; in a common absence, I mean. in any case I’ll suffer it.” ~ Elie Wiesel, The Town Beyond the Wall.

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“Some people have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that’s their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you’re that pissed that so many others had it good.” ~Melvin Udall

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“Every story has a story.” ~Patricia Hampl

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“Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to a system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness.” ~ William James, Pragmatism, p. 130.

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“Elementary school teachers love the kids, High school teachers love the subject, College professors love themselves.” ~ Howard Gardner

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“What makes research possible is the understanding that we are not altogether unique. Just as we are all made of flesh and bone, similar sense and similar sinew, we also share similar habits of mind and of action. Without these basic similarities, generalizations that touch on the human condition would have no reasonable foundation. Even when people seem alien to us, they tend to be alien in similar ways. In part, this is because the environment is limiting. And by this I do not mean only the physical environment, but the psychic environment within which meanings are constructed. Language, symbols. Similar people living in a similar world thinking in similar ways. Without this similarity, coherency, consistency, and mutual understandings would not be possible. Even when we find someone extraordinary, the difference is always in degree and not in kind. It is to that end that we have superlative adverbs. And IQ tests. In fact, when an individual strays too far from conduct that is similar to our own, we hardly know what to make of it. If the conduct is particularly abhorrent, the individual is dismissed as inhuman, an animal of sorts. If the conduct is particularly benign, the individual is said to be a saint, an angel, a god. In any case, not a person.”

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“In order to succeed, we must first believe we can.” ~ Michael Korda

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Before you criticize others, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you will be a mile away and have their shoes. ~Jack Handy

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The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? Death. What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alchohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months warm, happy, and floating…you finish off as an orgasm. ~Jack Handy

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I don’t need that kind of suggestibility in my life.

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Today the platitudes of life rest easy on my shoulders, and simple thoughts have meaning and make sense. You are unwise to think me wise today. Answers are easy when questions are disguised as childhood crises that end up in smiles.

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Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown. Lawrence: We can’t all be lion tamers.

~from Lawrence of Arabia

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A reminder to us all that he really said what we thought he said:

“If we are to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs, we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined. We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions. This possibility is offensive to many people. It is opposed to a tradition of long standing which regards man as a free agent, whose behavior is the product, not of specifiable antecedant conditions, but of spontaneous inner changes of course … If we cannot show what is responsible for a man’s behavior, we say that he himself is responsible for it. The precursors of physical science once followed the same practice, but the wind is no longer blown by Aeolus, nor is the rain cast down by Jupiter Pluvius.” ~ B. F. Skinner, 1953.

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“Language is a very hard thing to put into words.” ~Voltaire

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“We probably live our way into a system of thinking rather than think our way into a pattern of living. This means that living is more influential in determining thinking than thinking is in determining living.” ~ Herman H. Horne. From “An idealistic philosophy of education” in The 41st Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I, Philosophies of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1942, pp. 139-195. Quote is on p. 141.

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“Moral virtues come from habits . . . They are not in us neither by nature, nor in despite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them, and we develop them through habit . . . these virtues we acquire first by exercising them, as in the case of other arts. Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it: men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we come to be brave.” ~ Aristotle

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The phases individuals go through when acquiring property: infatuation, justification, appropriation, obsession, appreciation, resale ~ the Ferengi (and they should know)

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Heaven is a place in which the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are Germans, the lovers Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss, Hell is a place in which the police are German, the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.

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This is an actual email message sent to me after I asked for instructions regarding how to forward my email while I was abroad:

To forward mail 1. Go to main screen. 2. Go to unix shell. 3. type “pico .forward” 4. when you get the blank screen, type the email address to which you want the messages sent. e.g., \mpajare, 5. Ctrl+x to save, and save in .forward 6. Messages stay on the server 7. Emory has disabled this feature, so you cannot use it

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“As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.” ~David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham . . . to which A. Danielian replied, “This might lead one to conclude that the ultimate spiritual achievement would be to have an infinite amount of faith in precisely nothing.”

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I will not die. It is the world that will end.

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/wordattic.html