When Voltaire said:
“Once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.”
I don’t think he’d anticipated smartphones.
Food for Thought [Voltaire & Smartphones]
Reply
Tag Archives: ideas
A Life Improbable [Free Verse]
Each of us lives a life improbable, the gift of an ancestor who struggled through some terror which killed others. We each have an iron impulse to maintain a cracking grip on life, but some won't ever be pried away, growing like the stunted pine that juts from the mountainside: gnarled but indestructible. Live improbably with your life improbable.
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Five Wise Lines from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” [Plus Five Lines, More]
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
william blake
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William blake
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
William Blake
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
William Blake
Exuberance is Beauty.
William blake
Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
William Blake
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William blake
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years. He answer’d: ‘The same that made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian.’
William Blake
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
William blake
NOTE: William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven in Hell” is available in many collections of his poetry, and is in the public domain and available via Project Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45315
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Under Pressure: Or, A House Divided [Free Verse]
A construction worker once told me -
for a building to last -
depends not so much on
its materials,
nor even on its foundations,
but rather on the building being
in balanced strain throughout.
A building stays up when its
parts press into each other firmly,
or pull at each other strongly,
but never too out of balance.
This web of unseen forces
allows the building stand solid
against any huffing, or puffing,
the world might throw its way.
A democratic society works the same.
It must have an establishment.
It must have a counterculture.
And these two elements must
constantly pull at each other
or mash into each other:
tension & compression,
compression & tension,
tug-of-war & sumo.
If one side is unopposed, or too weak,
the state will crumble into some kind of
authoritarianism by another name.
Destroy your enemies at your own peril.
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Master & Slave [Lyric Poem]
What will be your master,
and what will be your slave?
Will you court disaster
to be perceived as brave?
Will you call your pastor
to hide that which you crave,
or be your own ringmaster
and own how you behave?
And will you choose virtue,
or live in fear of vice?
Will you choose to be true,
or default to being nice?
And when there's much ado
will you jet their paradise?
Or just defer your view,
as act some men and mice?
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Edgeless Edge [Free Verse]
Some speculate about
the edge of the universe,
and what exists beyond.
But that edge - if it exists -
is beyond another edge:
the farthest points
from which we can see light.
In a tower
on a mountain,
there's still an edge
of our eyesight --
like the others,
it's an edgeless edge,
signifying nothing
but our own limitations.
We are builders
of edgeless edges,
fashioning boundaries
that don't bound anything,
but by which we are bound.
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Spontaneous Ideation [Free Verse]
ideas accelerate to the surface like air bubbles from whence they came, i cannot say they passed up from below the lit sea from the darkness maybe, like air bubbles, they follow a mostly straight path, but i cannot say for certain what happens below the light i catch only the vapor that drifts up out of the popping bubbles and it must be gathered quickly before it spreads on the wind, becoming lukewarm nothing... damn increasing entropy!
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The Flow of Wild Ideas [Free Verse]
We need a flow of wild ideas, though some will drift ever onward, into the vast nowhere: beyond application or reason. One will catch on the shore, others will pile into it, becoming a beaver dam of bad ideas. Unstable? Maybe. But the flood will rise, and lift that stuck idea, and send the whole logjam spiraling out to the deeps where maybe one idea will float apart, and find the light that makes it look worth chasing.
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Quotations Stumbled Upon [Recently]
To survive in this world you have to be many times a coward but at least once a hero.
Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s son
The metaphysical assumptions upon which you want to build your life cannot be an inherited duty.
Patrick levy, Sadhus
It is true that if there were no phenomena which were independent of all but a manageably small set of conditions, Physics would be impossible.
Eugene wigner, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences
I feel about literature what Grant did about war. He hated it. I hate literature. I’m not a literary West Pointer; I do not love a literary man as a literary man, as a minister of the pulpit loves other ministers because they are ministers: it is a means to an end, that is all there is to it.
Walt whitman, as quoted in Yone Noguchi’s the spirit of japanese poetry
Know that all the sects in existence are a way to Hell.
Nichiren, as quoted by yone Noguchi in the spirit of japanese poetry
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
oscar wilde, the critic as artist
If you meet at a dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself — a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with — you rise from the table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience it is!
Oscar wilde, tHE CRITIC AS ARTIST
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Diamondless Diamonds [Free Verse]
Diamondless Diamonds? Sounds like Daoist doublespeak or a crazy Zen koan. But, it's that which has imaginary value, but not real value. Much of what human hands reach for or produce (& which human minds obsess upon) are diamondless diamonds. People stare at them with covetous eyes, but when those eyes saccade away there's no reason to believe the diamondless diamond still exists. Eyes covet what the mind knows to have no particular worth. Diamondless Diamonds may change the world for moments at a time, but then are gone - and instantly forgotten.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 