Thomas Carlyle

"Time is the silent, never-resting thing......rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim."

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

A chronicler of the human comedy. W. Somerset Maugham said: "His greatness lies not in a single work, but in the formidable mass of his productiom." Balzac created two-thousand characters ranging from innkeepers, clerics, journalists, bureaucrats, merchants, and prostitutes. They were so lifelike even Balzac believed in them. While dying, he called for his medical character: "Send for Biachon" he implored. "Biachon will save me."

Paul Tillich

"The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, inspite of being unacceptable."

Philipa Walker

"Take time every day to do something silly"
(I did yesterday)

I think Julie is still laughing at me!

A Vignette

I have a new cell phome. In trying to learn how to use it I accidently called my son-in-law at work in Lafayette three times - he was in a meeting and couldn't answer; I called my brother's law office in Columbus; and I called myself twice - the first time I picked up the house phone and got no answer - the second time, my grand-daughter who had come to help me, got the giggles and couldn't stop laughing. But that's not all - the next morning it suddenly started talking to me - it said "It's 10 minutes past 9 - it's time to get up!"

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

In the opening of his "Metamorphosis" he captures man's neurotic self-absorbtion: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect." So powerful is his surrealist imagery that "Kafkaesque" has entered the popular vocabulary to describe everything from the Holocaust to the incongruities of our daily lives. Only Proust and Joyce rival his impact on 20th century literature.

Albert Einstein

"When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about."

Shakespeare

"Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel."
(Sorry about the prior goofs - I don't know how to delete them)

Shakespear

Shakespear

Henry Drummond

"I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder to each other.......How much the world needs it! How easily it is done!

Learning

"Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
(Historian Will Durant)

James Joyce (1882-1941)

His "Ulysses", modeled on Homer's epic, an account of one day in the lives of a Dublin salesman, his wife, and a teacher is considered by some as the most influential novel of the 20th century. George Bernard Shaw praised it but then declined a request to buy it saying, in his typically disparaging style, "If you imagine any Irishman would pay 150 francs for a book, you know little of my countrymen."

Helen Keller

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain."

Bill Gates

"I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion."

George Boole (1815-1864)

This mathematician is responsible for the logic behind today's computer technology. If you search a computer database you will use Boolean logic - if you use and to link two terms you narrow the search; if you use or to link the same terms , you broaden the search. Boole created a binary system of symbolic logic based on two numbers - 0 and 1 - that today we call Boolean algebra used in computer technology. In 1854, he published his masterpiece "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought."

James Jeans (physicist)

"The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature . . . . seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought . . . . The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."

Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead."

Greg Peterson

"Asked to name the most exotic thing in the universe, most of us would mention either the very large (black holes and supernovas) or the very small (all those spooky little particles). But the most incredible structure in the entire universe may be what is sitting behind our eyeballs. Inside our heads is the most complex and sophisticated device in creation."

Ayn Rand

"Atlas Shrugged" was the only book of fiction ever written by this American (Russian born) philosopher. The 1100 page novel embodies her passionate celebration of indvidualism, free will, capitalism, logic, and reason. She said she wrote with a sense of mission "and after Atlas I was no longer pressured, my lifelong asssignment was over." She believed she had explained her philosophical views clearly enough and did not write another word of fiction for the rest of her life. According to a 1991 Library of Congress Report, her book is considered the second most influencial book after the Bible in the lives of its readers.

Artificial Intelligence

Computer chess doesn't help us understand human thinking because computers don't form or follow plans, do not have goals, do not use analogy or metaphor, have no common sense or consciousness. Computer pioneer John Holland says: "There are many artificial intelligence problems that cannot be solved by simply performing more calculations." and that is what computers do - perform calculations.

Mohandas Gandhi

"Be the change that you want to see in the world."

Susan Blackmore (again)

"We might think we humans designed all those computers and phone links for our own pleasure, but from the meme's-eye-view we are just their copying machines, and they are using us to design a vast planet-wide system for their own propagation."
(I'm not ready for this Susan - I'm still trying to understand yesterday's posting!)

Memes

"Robert Aunger challenged us to provide an existence proof for memes, or to come up with supported, unique predictions from meme theory. I suggest that no existence proof is required because memes are defined as information that is copied from person to person. So as long as you admit that imitation occurs, they must exist."
(Susan Blackmore)

William Faulkner

On this day in 1929, his "The Sound and the Fury" was published, his fourth novel and most famous. Early reviewers compared it to Dostoesky and Euripides. A first printing of 1789 copies lasted a year and a half - more than he expected. He maintained his folksy, self-depreciating view that the book was a "splendid failure" right to the end, even after wordwide fame and the Nobel Prize.

Aristotle

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."

Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859

This scientist made a six-thousand-mile expedition through the forests of Latin America marveling at "the stupendous display of wild and gigantic nature". In his lifetime he collected sixty thousand botanical specimens and identified 3500 species. Emerson called him "one of the wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, who appear from time to time, as if to show the possibilites of the human mind".

John Glenn

"There is still no cure for the common birthday."

Satchel Paige

"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?"

John Stuart Mill (1803-1873)

He was reading Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight, and writing a history of Roman government at age eleven. This brilliant man wrote about philosophy, political science, logic, and ethics. His essay "On Liberty" is the finest argument for the rights of individuals versus the state. He later observed "I was never a boy, never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her own way."

James Thurber

"Let us not look back in anger, not forward in fear, but around us in awareness."

E. B. White

On this day in 1985 he died at the age of 86. He was an essayist, poet, novelist. His advice to writers: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." It was he who convinced the New Yorker that the drawings of his friend James Thurber should be published in the magazine.