I'm hoping to find a way to liven up the BLS forums, and my first attempt at doing this will be to present some quotations and commentary for your perusal. The idea is to take little snippets of literature--where 'literature' is taken in a broad context--and to mine some food for thought from them. Please feel free to make your own comments or add some interesting quotations to the discussion*.

*Please don't just add quotations. Try to interpret them, connect them to your life or to other ideas, or at least provide some background about why they're interesting to you. The whole idea is to get a conversation about ideas going.

First quotation:

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

~ Publilius Syrus, Maxims

I think it certain spammers may now appreciate this quotation What I find interesting about the quotation is this: silence has value. I don't think that silence is just vacuous and meaningless. Silence can be provocative and even subversive. It can be devastating.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Second quotation:

~ Franz Kafka

This is a nice thought: we can be so quiet that the world will offer itself to us. This connects us back to the idea of silence. If we are silent, perhaps even within ourselves, we may learn something or we may be treated to something special.

Third quotation:

Great spirits have always encountered violent oppostion from mediocre minds.

~ Albert Einstein

I think that some quotations profess "great truths" (which are really just little truths that some of us can relate to in some way)--this quotation does exactly that. This is something that can be looked upon as an observation of humankind through history, but it can also be found in everyday life. A child may have some idea that's discounted by her parent, just because she's a child. The very idea that thought or feeling itself may be pounded upon by average demands is frightening. But again if we look at historical examples, we may observe that during the Holocaust, populations often ignored or shut out important problems. Intellectuals ignored the fact that millions of innocent people were being slaughtered; governments deliberately refused asylum to hundreds of thousasnds of refugees. Ignorance, we may see, is an act. It is an act of violence against thought and feeling.

This post was edited by RewtheBrave on Oct 4 2008 04:22pm

1st!

Very nice, we need more, etc.

This is all you have to offer? You have 15k posts and still trying to get +1's? It's hard to improve the BLS section due to people like you.

My quote:

"I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details." - Albert Einstein

Here is my thought and it's a rhetorical question because I know someone is going to try and answer it:

If the one of the smartest men who ever lived acknowledged that their is a God, how could you not? If your smarter then Einstein then you've got me.

I'm not attempting to turn this into a religious debate, just trying to provoke some deep thinking.

just because he was brilliant in one area doesnt make him the ultimate source of knowlegde on things like religion

His opus contains a lot of brilliant discussion on judaism and the jewish people. He really felt that "his" people needed help, and that they were history's scapegoats. Near the end of his life, he was offered a position as Israeli President, if i"m not mistaken. He refused the position, althougha t the the time he was suffering form the stomach ailments that would eventually take his life.



Einstein reportedly had a childhood IQ of about 125, and an adult IQ of 161--nothing extreme. His genous was in his work ethic and in his creativity, as well as in the strength of his passions. He was a gifted mathematician, too, so there's no knock against him in saying that he had some mental limitations (besides, everyone does). I think we meet up with some of his limitations when we encounter his theology (just as he wasn't very adept with quantum physcis, even though he pretty much founded it). It's easy to go beyond what one knows when one professes what what beleives. Then again, how can we know anything with certainty?

The ability to describe the world in physical (i.e. rational) terms doesn't make the world rational. The ability to see beauty in the cosmos does not mean that it was designed. I'm not sure there's any good reason to believe in God, so using Einstein as a kind of pedestal through which to speak of God is probably equally pointless, except perhaps in pointing out some of his beliefs and their dreaml-ike foundations, or perhaps to provide a point of reflection on the beauty of the cosmos. No matter whether Einstein was right or wrong about God, his opinions are worth thinking about.

Rhetorical question, rhetorical answer

Here's a new quote to stir things up a bit:

"Hate the sin, love the sinner."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

I take this away from its religious context and rephrase it like so: "Hate the act, love the actor" or "Hate the crime, love the criminal". There's something interesting in that. One thing Itry to do on the forums isto constantly point out ways in which members might improve their behavious. I see some pretty bad stuff, but I try to put more belief in certain members than they put in themselves. There's an open question about whether it's worthwhile or effective to do that, but when I see positive results, it really feels good. Gandhi has a very empowering idea. What do you guys think of this?

Honestly, I'd rather just fart in a bottle and save it for later. But if you wanna try ziplock bagging it, I heard that works great too. Lmk how the experiment goes! - Makemetalmusic

Brilliant guy imo. But just to really add something :

With strange aeons, even death may die. - H.P. Lovecraft.

I interpret it as saying that given eternity, existance may cease to exist.

Nice one--from the Necronomicon--of course the text around it was never written.



It's an odd passage

Line1: some things last forever
Line2: death can die

I think you've interpreted L2 as "death can stop", which is a very interesting idea. L1 seems like it must "refer" to something different. Maybe L1 suggests, for example, than even a dead body isn't dead, because it remains as something (even if not as itself) forever. And that might then fit with L2 if L2 means "if weird stuff happens [if we see things differently or if things were different], we don't need to think of deatha s something that happens. And that fits because now we'd have:

L1: death isn't what we think it is
L2: and if we think along the lines of L1, we don't need to worry about death

So I'd say it might not be so much about the idea that through eternity, death may cease to exist; rather, it may be saying that through eternity, we will see that death in fact doesn't exist. A twist of the tale, but perhaps a point worth making

This post was edited by RewtheBrave on Oct 8 2008 09:51am

i like this post much better than the battle post t=
bls wiil never have much traffic i think.. the larger majority of the population seems to be teenagers who, as u can see by the other posts, are primarily interested in science fiction if interested in reading at all
im not sneering at the genre, its just so self contained is all

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
~ Publilius Syrus, Maxims
I think it certain spammers may now appreciate this quotation What I find interesting about the quotation is this: silence has value. I don't think that silence is just vacuous and meaningless. Silence can be provocative and even subversive. It can be devastating.

i agree silence can be many things besides wat we normally attribute it as, but i dono if subversion works.. well i have subversive literature in mind.. but mebe u mean something else
i enjoy gandhi's humanism as much as u do too, i have a quote of his in my prof

My quote:
"I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details." - Albert Einstein
Here is my thought and it's a rhetorical question because I know someone is going to try and answer it:
If the one of the smartest men who ever lived acknowledged that their is a God, how could you not? If your smarter then Einstein then you've got me.
I'm not attempting to turn this into a religious debate, just trying to provoke some deep thinking.

rew already chastised u properly but to add,
u cant just say im right because of this reason and then discourage discussion..
this is the kind of thinking that the ideologically confined might be subject to.
and btw, ive heard that einstein would frequently leave his house without remembering to put his pants on -.0

I'm back with a new quotation:

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
~ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I

Maybe I like this one b/c I'm not a morning person I think the quotation is more about the need to step out and become a little wild (or Wilde) than about the time of day in which one is at one's best. Or else he really hates morning people People who wake up at their best probably didn't have wild nights beforehand, so I guess a bit of bohemianism and hedonism is a way to be really brilliant. Hard to say, but I nabbed the quotation out of context without reading or observing An Ideal Husband.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein

To keep the Einstein thing going I figured this quote suited the topic as a whole rather well. The quote is more or less self explanatory and I fully support it. If one doesn't stand and wonder "why" then what truly is their purpose on this planet? I feel that simple question is the purpose of life, that's what its all about, to learn the "why" of life.