hum

I don’t know about hierarchy. I think it’s a psychological thing. But then, why should I behave differently to the cleaning lady in the house to Mr Arnault? We are all humans.

‘It is demonstrably true,’ he would say, ‘that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose. Observe how noses were made to bear spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Legs are evidently devised to be clad in breeches, and breeches we have. Stones were formed in such a way that they can be hewn and made into castles, and so His Lordship has a very beautiful castle. The greatest baron in the province must be the best lodged. And since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who have argued that all is well have been talking nonsense. They should have said that all is for the best.’

Candide

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.

Benny stood right in front of the band and made this horrible gesture of covering his ears, waving the band away and looked pained as he pointed at the bass player, a look of total contempt.  After doing this he walked very slowly back to our table.  I was always slightly ashamed of behavior like that in front of people, so I asked, “What on earth did you do that for?” He stood and pointed from across the room at the bass player and said, “HE knows!”

Steven C. Smith

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful.

Vincent van Gogh

A man with genius is unendurable if he does not also possess at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

Nietzsche

Naval officers will no longer raise their glasses to “Our wives and sweethearts” - typically met with the unofficial reply “May they never meet”.

BBC News

An airport was required to finish off the Japanese.

BBC Two

Accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory … really, it’s not about you.

What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Viktor Frankl