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1. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeMar 24th 2007 edited

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   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <strong><em>"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."</em></strong>
   </p>
   <p>
   - Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   The Sheltering Sky is the story of a naive American couple who travel into the Sahara, lose themselves in another culture and are destroyed. "They didn't know what they were doing or where they were going, of course," says Bowles. Their characters are not strong enough to stop the menace of the landscape and its people, from overpowering them.<br />
   <br />
   Paul Bowles described The Sheltering Sky as "an adventure story in which the actual adventures take place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert and in the inner desert of the spirit." The adventure has an aura of both fascination and dread.<br />
   <br />
   Some say the story is an allegory for life in the 20th century, and I think it still applies. The Sheltering Sky is considered one of the seminal novels of mid-20th century American fiction.
   </p>
   <p>
   <a href="http://www.creativityatwork.com/Newsletters/Nov00-sheltering-sky.html">http://www.creativityatwork.com/Newsletters/Nov00-sheltering-sky.html </a>
   </p>
2. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeApr 20th 2007 edited

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   <cite></cite>
   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <strong><em>Then said a teacher, "Speak to us of Teaching."<br />
   <br />
   And he said:<br />
   No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of our knowledge.<br />
   The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.<br />
   If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.<br />
   The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.<br />
   The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.<br />
   And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.<br />
   For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.<br />
   And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.</em></strong>
   </p>
   <p>
   - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalil_Gibran" target="_blank">Kahlil Gibran</a> , a Lebanese writer, artist and philosopher, wrote his best known book, <a href="http://leb.net/gibran/works/prophet/prophet.html" target="_blank"><strong>The Prophet</strong></a> in 1923, and it was during the counter-culture movement in America and elsewhere in the 1960s the book became really popular. This book has been translated into over 20 languages. Now all his books are already in <a href="http://leb.net/gibran/works.html" target="_blank">public domain</a> .
   </p>
3. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeApr 27th 2007

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   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <strong><em>"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."</em></strong>
   </p>
   <p>
   - Kurt Vonnegurt, Cat's Cradle
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   Another koan of sorts from Cat's Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man's just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there's a kindness to Bokonon's belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody's gotta do it.
   </p>
   <p>
   Scott Gordon, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O'Neal, Tasha Robinson, Kyle Ryan, <em><a href="http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/15_things_kurt_vonnegut_said ">15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will</a></em>
   </p>
   <p>
    
   </p>
4. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeMay 12th 2007 edited

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   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <em><strong>
   "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."</strong></em>
   </p>
   <p>
   - William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   William Hazlitt<em> </em>(1778 - 1830), an English Writer who was a contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Williams Wordworth, was more well known as a great literary critic. His analysis of Shakespeare was said to rival those of Samuel Johnson.
   </p>
5. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeJul 1st 2007 edited

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   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <em><strong>
   "Science is rather a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted."</strong></em>
   </p>
   <p>
   - "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science", Natalie Angier
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   From The Observer, <a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2115519,00.html" target="_blank">The new age of ignorance</a> by Tim Adams,
   </p>
   <blockquote>
   <p>
   The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school - full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: 'This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.' For physics: 'Almost everything we've come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.' Along the way there are all sorts of facts that stick: 'You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent', for example; or, if you imagined the history of our planet as a single 75-year human life span: 'The first ape did not arrive until May or June of the final year... and Neil Armstrong muddied up the Moon at 20 seconds to midnight.'
   </p>
   </blockquote>
6. •  
     CommentAuthorkifo
   • CommentTimeSep 23rd 2007 edited

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   <blockquote>
   <p>
   <em><strong>
   "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."</strong></em>
   </p>
   <p>
   - "God in the Dock", C. S. Lewis
   </p>
   </blockquote>
   <p>
   C.S. Lewis is the writer of The Chronicle of Narnia fame and a noted Christian apologist.
   </p>