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"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." - Arnold Toynbee

It's like me and basketball.. if I shoot for the basket, I miss but if I shoot father, into a harder goal, the ball falls into the basket. I guess the moral is you should always shoot a little farther.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. Shall we just have the last verse again, and I'll let you go."

(quote from Tue 2/24/2009 reading)

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin... But there was alwasy some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."

"Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?"

"If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until you see how expensive it is when it's free."

- P. J. O'Rourke

"The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic managment.� The roads serving forty-five thousand people are 'verkeersbordvrij': free of nearly all road signs.� Drahten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called 'unsafe is safe.'� The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces.� The only rules are that drivers should yield to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.

The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety.� Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time), people are forced to drive more mindfully--operating their cars with more care and attention to surrounding circumstances."

From "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It", Jonathan L. Zittrain, "Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia"

"The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol." (from "The Misanthrope's Corner", May 2001)

cf. "The One Who Is Not Busy"

"My advice to young writers is to stop reading like readers and start reading like writers.� Reread stories, books, and passages from books that work for you.� Dissect the prose.� Write it out yourself longhand.� Get inside the mind of the writer.� Figure out why it works.� Then go forth and do the same." (p. 225, In Fact: the Best of Creative Non-Fiction,�Mark Bowden, "Finders Keepers: The Story of Joey Coyle")

This advice reminds me of Tobais Woolf in "Old School" typing out passages by his favorite writers.... of course, in that case, his identification with the stories he was copying went a bit too far.... but, it is still an intriguing technique.