Aphorisms, ad libs, and various other eccentric extemporanea…
The First Law of Attention:
People will not listen to what you tell them and will not read what you send them.
The Second Law of Attention:
Rather than look for it, people will ask for information you have already supplied.
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When it comes to your health, spend. What else are you going to use your money for?
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Myth is the apotheosis of history.
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If meaning is not everywhere it is nowhere.
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All you have is time, and time is only Now.
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Holiness resides not in people or in things, but in moments.
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There is no evidence, however compelling, that cannot be easily dismissed by a deeply-held contrary belief.
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“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” – Francis Bacon
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When someone asked a fellow musician how he could ‘learn to play like that’, the musician replied, “All it takes is obsession.”
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Objective truth confirms subjective truth and not the other way around.
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Necessity is not just the mother, but the muscle of invention.
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It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.
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Smartphones/social media are to culture as climate change is to the planet: a slow death.
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Do not let the opinions of others determine your own feeling of self-worth.
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Americans think 100 years is a long time; Europeans think 100 miles is a long way.
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Do not fear being unique.
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“Beauty’s as important as cornbread” – Rosa Hicks, wife of storyteller Ray Hicks
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The sun is rising… four miles down the river.
“Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.”
– William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
We experience the world around us as full of things. All we know are things. We name them so we can think and talk about them. Even space, emptiness, is some-thing. The idea that there can be no-thing, an absolute absence or negation of thing-ness, exists not in our experience, but as an abstraction of the mind, like negative numbers – or purity. Perhaps the mind’s greatest achievement is… no-thing.
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When you search for truth, the eyes have it.
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Oneness gives validity to all similes.
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‘Contentment is Wealth’ – Irish tune title.
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Some money costs too much.
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Faith is the victory of hope over experience.
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Evidence is objective, fact-based, verifiable and logical.
In the presence of Evidence, faith is not required; facts are facts.
Faith is subjective, hope-based, un-verifiable and beyond logic.
In the presence of Faith, evidence is not required; Faith defeats facts.
Faith, quite literally, defies Logic.
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Just because we don’t yet know the answer to a question doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Just because we don’t yet know the answer to a question doesn’t mean we can assign the answer to a supernatural cause we happen to prefer.
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Assume nothing; learn how to See.
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Every cigarette you smoke gives Death another blowjob.
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Science is only as accurate as its tools.
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Doc Watson never cared what his guitar looked like.
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String players: the left hand is what you know; the right hand is who you are. (reverse for lefties)
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Social media = cultural gangrene
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“Now, why were men granted two ears but a single tongue? That they might speak half as much as they listen… Knowledge makes a sharp scythe, I think.” – Evan S. Connell
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The beauty of science is that it is always self-correcting; the tragedy of faith is that it is not.