Favorite quotes

pinhedz wrote:"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth."

--Oscar Wilde

This might explain why people will divulge things on discussion fora that they won't tell their friends and families.

Elisabeth had to do a project for English called "About Myself." On the cover with her photograph she put the
Wilde quotation, "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."

...^...

"Maybe the dingo ate your baby"







It's what happens when you don't build a dingo fence

I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

Barbellion

"Parting is such sorrow..."

By the Man.

blue moon wrote:I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

Barbellion

but who he decided, Macaulay or Ruskin?

and why did he change his name?

otro nombre wrote:

blue moon wrote:I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

Barbellion

but who he decided, Macaulay or Ruskin?

and why did he change his name?

Ah...who knows what he decided.
Poor eggo has the same dilemma!

'Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion was the nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings (7 September 1889 – 22 October 1919), an English diarist who was responsible for The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Ronald Blythe called it "among the most moving diaries ever created" '

That's just such a great name for a diary.

He had an interesting life...but a sad one.

[

From wiki:

Early life and education
Cummings was born in Barnstaple in 1889. He was a naturalist at heart and ended up working at the British Museum's department of Natural History in London. Having begun his journal at the age of thirteen, Cummings continued to record his observations there - gradually moving from dry scientific notes to a more personal, literary style. His literary ambitions changed course in 1914 upon reading the journal of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, in whom he recognised a kindred spirit (see the 14 October 1914 entry of his Journal); in his 15 January 1915 entry he indicated that he intended to prepare his Journal for publication: "Then all in God’s good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication."

Army rejection
Cummings' life changed forever when he was called to enlist in the British Army to fight in World War I in November 1915. He had consulted his doctor before taking the regulation medical prior to enlisting, and his doctor had given him a sealed, confidential letter to present to the medical officer at the recruitment centre. Cummings did not know what was contained in the letter, but in the event it was not needed; the medical officer rejected Cummings as unfit for active duty after the most cursory of medical examinations. Hurt, Cummings decided to open the letter on his way back home to see what had been inside, and was staggered to learn that his doctor had diagnosed him as suffering from the disease now known as multiple sclerosis, and that he almost certainly had less than five years to live.

The news changed Cummings profoundly, and his journal became much more intense and personal as a result. He had married shortly before discovering his illness, and had a daughter, Penelope, in October 1916, but was later moved to discover that his prospective wife, Eleanor, had been informed of his condition long before he himself knew his fate, and his efforts to spare the feelings of his family had been in vain since they had known his condition even before he had.

pinhedz wrote:"If it is not possible, make it possible."
-- Svetlana

I don't know where it comes from but here I've heard people say "what cannot be cannot be and furthermore it's impossible"

87

.

you trying to give credit to your climate change thread?

Ah yes. I meant that...credibility, not credit

bluebottle likes credibility. bluebottle likes credit. wotcha gonna do?

how much credit do you want for your credibility services?

speaking of camus

can't find it. But I recall, not sure how acurate, the stranger telling himself he should have payed attention and read about death by guillotine when he was imprisoned to meet it.

ah found it:
"This problem of a loophole obsesses me; I am always wondering if there have
been cases of condemned prisoners’ escaping from the implacable machinery of
justice at the last moment, breaking through the police cordon, vanishing in the nick
of time before the guillotine falls. Often and often I blame myself for not having
given more attention to accounts of public executions. One should always take an
interest in such matters. There’s never any knowing what one may come to. Like
everyone else I’d read descriptions of executions in the papers. But technical books
dealing with this subject must certainly exist; only I’d never felt sufficiently
interested to look them up. And in these books I might have found escape stories.
Surely they’d have told me that in one case, anyhow, the wheels had stopped; that
once, if only once, in that inexorable march of events, chance or luck had played a
happy part. Just once! In a way I think that single instance would have satisfied me."

I think this has come to my mind in the sense that one might find oneself stripped off tools or find useless all s/he's developed when presented under untrodden fatal circumstances (I don't mean fatal exclusively for death and I don't mean it exclusively for a passive person)

"There were policemen in classes, to report. But the authorities would say well, let them say whatever they want, because thanks to mr x and mr p and mister z who say things not gallant toward the regime, the impression appears that there's freedom"- JLSampedro

"Merci pour la cauliflower  "

-- The naive pinhed with no royal taster

 

'Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools'
 

― Napoleon

^ when he named his sources




this sounds like "... and had something of the spirit of the universe in it, I don't remember the exact quote right now"