
“The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.”
Source: This Is How You Lose Her
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
“The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.”
Source: This Is How You Lose Her
“You will be free of the world's turbulence as soon as you stop taking your thoughts so seriously.”
Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1980), p. 73 - Book one: The winds of change - Cutting free
Introduction to the 2002 edition, p. 12
The Heart of Change, (2002)
“I like that saying of Thoreau’s that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.””
Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking that wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers were out on the edge, seeking that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight with things. The things were owned by all the same people and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness.
The Paris Review interview (1994)
Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo
Context: The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
“A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”
Source: Persuasion (1817)
“At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists.”
Source: Letter to Mrs. Sarah Brydges Willyams (17 October 1863), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 73
“The secret of joy is: To know the world and its evil powers … and still preserve the hope.”
Joy: Share it! p.54.
Joy: Share it! (2017)