Myself and some friends are working on a paper on the "conservation of folly." If you have any input I would love to hear it (we have sections on meta-stable folly, folly cross-sections, anthropic folly principle, unexpended folly...).

"I am always willing to learn. I do not, however, always enjoy being taught." ~Churchill


"You can't polish a turd." ~Jeremy Taggart


"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine." ~Honoré de Balzac


"Period revival. Me trying to reconstruct how my life worked until just a few weeks ago. How my dysfunction used to function so beautifully...When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. it looks like a very viable option." (Choke, 211)


"I am quick to laugh at everything, so as not to have to cry." ~ De Beaumarchais


"I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I , too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year--what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer." (The Gay Science, 276).


"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art .... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."- C.S. Lewis


"Cosmology has the ability to grab hold of us at a deep, visceral level because an understanding of how things began feels - at least to some - like the closest we may ever come to understanding why they began."- Brian Greene


"Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Thomas a Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance." ~Aldous Huxley, Genius and the Goddess

"It makes so little sense that it's almost real. Which is more than can be said for any of the academic kinds of fiction. Physics and chemistry fiction. History fiction. Philosophy fiction…."~Aldous Huxley, Genius and the Goddess


"No, it's all true-so far as it goes. After that, it's all rubbish-or rather it's non-existent." ~Aldous Huxley, Genius and the Goddess

"Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied as far as possible, in the idea of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations, of sentiments, instinct, dispositions of the soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express-which excludes all but .01 percent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don't write such books. But then, I never pretended to be a congenital novelist….. The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it is a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren't quite real; they're slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, p. 307)

" 'At this very moment,' Mr. Scogan went on, 'the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, disemboweled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any less because of them? Most certainly we do not… A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily we aren't a sympathetic race.' " (Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, p. 77)

"All philosophers and all religions, what are they but spiritual tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below them and above them stretches the blind mass of the earth, endless and unexplored."( Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow 118)

"Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons."("The Desert" Collected Essays 26)

"Everyone's a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time. The man who slips on a banana-skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, he falls, the most richly comical arabesque." (Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay 275)

"Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves." ~Aldous Huxley. Point Counter Point, ch. 1

"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention." ~Aldous Huxley. "Vulgarity in Literature" in Music at Night and Other Essays

"Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs." ~Aldous Huxley. Themes and Variations, "Variations on a Philosopher" (1950).

"Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors." ~Aldous Huxley. Do What You Will, "Wordsworth in the Tropics" (1929).

"Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." ~Aldous Huxley. Texts and Pretexts, Introduction (1932).

"Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself." ~Aldous Huxley. Do What You Will, "Wordsworth in the Tropics" (1929).

"Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent."~ Aldous Huxley

" 'You forget,' I said, 'I'm a writer, and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.'/ 'And God,' he added quickly, 'is not their brother. God isn't the son of memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury the dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die every other moment. That's the most important thing I learned from Helen.' " (Genius and the Goddess 9)

"We practice alchemy in reverse-touch gold and it turns into lead; touch pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash."(G&G 36)

" 'How can anyone seriously believe in his own identity?' he went on. 'In logic, A equals A. Not in fact. Me-now is one kettle of fish; me-then is another."(G&G 44)

"At every instant every transience is eternally that transience. What signifies is its own being, and that being…is the same being as Being with the biggest possible B."(Genius and the Goddess 46)

" 'Every balcony scene turns into an affair of midgets in another universe! And in the end of course, there's always death. And while there is death, there is hope…Where was I? …In heaven…It lasted only about fifteen months.' "(Genius and the Goddess 50)

"It's the fault of course, of our philosophy of life; and our philosophy is the inevitable byproduct of a language that separates in idea what in actual fact is always inseparable. It separates and at the same time it evaluates. One of the abstractions is 'good,' and the other is 'bad.' Judge not that ye be judged. But the nature of language is such that we can't help judging. What we need is another set of words. Words that can express the natural togetherness of things. Muco-spiritual, for example, or dermatocharity. Or why not mastonoetic? But translated, of course, out of the indecent obscurity of a learned language into something you could use in everyday speech or even in lyrical poetry. How hard it is, without those still non-existent words, to discuss even so simple and obvious a case as Ruth's! The best one can do is to flounder about in metaphors." (Genius and the Goddess 53)

"Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking." ~Aldous Huxley. Mr. Topes, in Mortal Coils, "Green Tunnels"

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." Aldous Huxley. Do What You Will, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"

"Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced." Aldous Huxley. Grey Eminence, ch. 10.

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery." ~Aldous Huxley. Miss Thriplow, in Those Barren Leaves, pt. 1, ch. 1

"What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes-ah, they have all the necessary leisure." ~Aldous Huxley. "Vulgarity in Literature"

"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay-in solid cash-the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy." ~Aldous Huxley. Jesting Pilate, pt. 1

"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science." ~Aldous Huxley. Ends and Means, ch. 14, "Beliefs" (1937).

"Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism." ~Aldous Huxley Time Must Have a Stop, ch. 30

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself, since such a method often implies the loss of important properties of the system. We must keep out attention fixed on the whole and on the inter-connection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts."- Max Planck

".. it is impossible to distinguish sharply between natural philosophy and human culture. The physical sciences are, in fact, an integral part of our civilization, not only because our ever increasing mastery of the forces of nature has so completely changed the material conditions of life, but also because the study of these sciences has contributed so much to clarify the background of our own existence."- Niels Bohr

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."- Albert Einstein

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee." Ernest Hemingway. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."~John Milton. Paradise Lost, bk. 1. (also Keep the Aspidistra Flying)

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion…. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough." ~Aldous Huxley. Texts and Pretexts, "Amor Fati"

"The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous - all of us engage in it during all our waking hours; the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science; in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled with awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation."- Ervin Laszlo

"We have no organ at all for knowledge, for "truth": we "know" (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called "usefulness" is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish." Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, aph. 354