Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Still

"When autumn came sports excitement did not abate. College football teams took up the slack, as each Saturday they waged their wars on countless athletic fields. Between later September and Thanksgiving of 1927, some thirty million fans paid over $50 million to watch college football. To accommodate the crowds earger to see the performances of such collegiate celebrities as Red Grange of Illionois and Bronco Nagurski of Minnesota, American universities built stadiums, sometimes derided as “lunar craters”, that held between 70,000 and 100,000 spectators."

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Some goats I like

I've been tagged by Silverine. For the past 4 years or thereabouts, I've been in the habit of taking notes from books I read in the hope of documenting the worthwhile because I usually forget everything. Such being the case it is naturally impossible to take on the task of listing a mere 5 quotations as per the rules of the tag. Today, I was going through some of the notes I've made over the years and picked out a handful of the choicest from what little I managed to go through. I am pleased with the final collection I have assembled here because it covers a fairly interesting range of subjects, and that is very satisfactory considering I'm only culling out from a tiniest collection of my notes. A note of caution: The content of the quotations aren't necessarily ideas I subscribe to. They are merely quotations that appeal to me.



  • Friedrich Nietzsche’s beautiful description of Arthur Schopenhauer:
    He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.

  • Arthur Schopenhauer:
    Most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than death itself.

  • Arthur Schopenhauer:
    Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.

  • Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels(Note: Read the book to know definition of ‘Yahoo’):
    A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.

  • Arthur Schopenhauer:
    We are unhappy married, and unmarried we are unhappy. We are unhappy when alone, and unhappy when in society: we are like hedge-hogs clustering for warmth, uncomfortable when too closely packed, and yet miserable when kept apart. It is all very funny.

  • TAG ENDS HERE.

  • Sriram Sivaramakrishnan:
    Is quantum mechanics Ψ-Φ ?

  • Anjali Philip:
    I learnt to cook at the tender age of 8 months, when I lifted a jar of salt and emptied it into a bowl of chicken curry.

  • Socrates:
    Tragedy itself is proof of the fact that the Greeks were not pessimists .

  • Bertrand Russell:
    We think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind.

  • George Santayana:
    Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination.

  • William Somerset Maugham:
    The most important thing that money can buy is time.
The formating has been terrible because of my lack of familiarity with the blogger tools. Is there a way to directly insert a word formatted document in here?

I enjoyed going through my notes and must go through some more again some time. I tag:
Myself
Babe
Jk
Ramku
Kiran

I am not sure if even these 4 have RSS feeds to my blog. So if you are reading this and you have a blog ID, and you've left a comment, then you are tagged as well.