“To develop a complete mind – study the art of science, the science of art. Learn how to see, realise that everything is connected to everything else.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
Quotes
Does Children’s Television Matter?
“Suppose, if you will, that I am part of a silent Martian invasion and that my intention is slowly to destroy the whole culture of the human race. Where would I start? I would naturally start where thought first grows. I would start with children’s television. My policy would be to give the children only the sort of thing that they ‘already know they enjoy’, like a fizzing diet of manic jelly-babies. This would no doubt be exciting, but their hearts and their minds would receive no nourishment, they would come to know nothing of the richness of human life, love and knowledge, and slowly whole generations would grow up knowing nothing about anything but violence and personal supremacy. Is that a fairytale? Look around you.”
‘stay with the things that draw you like a magnet’
“Fail early and get it all over with. If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers. You can abide in intimate relationships. And you can have a worthwhile career. You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life.”
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“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”
ashes and words
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
On Invisibility
“Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.”
“In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place”
“A poem is an act of memory, first forged out of the need to remember what would otherwise be forgotten – in an oral tradition record-keeping is an art, not an act of administration.”
“we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense”
“Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that.”
Paul Greer 