Disjecta membra

[dulcamara-words]

Consider any human being who has caught your attention or roused your fervor: something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage. We rightly scorn those who have not made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone “happy,” no greater flattery than to grant him a “vein of melancholy". . . . This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

Emil Cioran. "Advantages of Debility". A short history of decay.

[dulcamara-words]

…All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . . .

Emil Cioran. "The Consciousness of Misery". A short history of decay.

[dulcamara-words]

And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping

Emil Cioran. "Resignation." A Short History of Decay.

[dulcamara-words]

"The most elegant and economical account is rarely the most effective for didactic purposes." Derek F. Lawden

[dulcamara-words]

I want to find a single justification that I may live and bear this dreadful daily spectacle of disease, of ugliness, of injustice, of death.

The Saviors of God, Nikos Kazantzakis

[dulcamara-words]

"To actually perform the integrals is almost impossible in most instances. It’s like trying to count goldfish in a pond, while they are swimming about and you can't count them all at once."

Jerrold Franklin, Classical Electromagnetism

[dulcamara-words]

... the author's derivations (in some 600 legal-size pages and in six additional notebooks) have been deposited in the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.

The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

[dulcamara-words]

"Are you a believer?" She asked.

"I certainly am" I said. "I believe in myself"

[dulcamara-words]

The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.

David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants, 1986.

[dulcamara-words]

Rules are just helpful guidelines for stupid people who can't make up their own mind. You obviously don't fit into that category, so why put yourself there?

House, M.D. TV series

[dulcamara-words]

his exhaustion was a blessing in disguise. Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all-pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental. But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep, he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice—hideous, witless justice.

The plague, Albert Camus

[dulcamara-words]

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration... Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

GEORGE E. P. BOX, Science and Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association

[dulcamara-words]

There is, however, also a superior level of paideia, which differs in its end from instruction: to educate someone means to make sure that that human being is at best and cultivate his humanity to the highest degree... moral principles are not transmitted through instruction, they are not subject of traditional teaching, and yet a moral code exists

Happiness and Aristotle's Definition of “Eudaimonia”, Capuccino 2013

[dulcamara-words]

Epidemic... an act of God

The word "influenza" was adopted in mid 18th century from Italian as it was coined during an influenza epidemic in 1743. Its taken from medieval Latin influentia.

"The word originally had the general sense ‘an influx, flowing matter’, also specifically (in astrology) ‘the flowing in of ethereal fluid (affecting human destiny)’."

[dulcamara-words]

“Plus on se cherche, plus on s'éloigne”

[dulcamara-words]

Honeymoon originally was referring to "affection waning like the moon". And once you know that the word suddenly turns anti-romantic

[dulcamara-words]

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman