Assorted Wisdom

"old and can do very little in a day". - Joy

~"... faced with insurmountable opportunities." - Pogo, I think
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo, definitely

"What would we do if we couldn't dig in the earth with our hands?" Grandmother Vaughan

"Write if you get work." - vv - something I picked up somewhere to close a conversation

42 - in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", calculated by a supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5M years.

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it" - ?Susan Mathews
"Green behind the ears." - ?
"It's still possible to be the Pope." - vv
"My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, And I Don't Love Jesus" - Jimmy Buffet
"Like walking on thin eggs." - complements of Eric Jones
"Bitten by the hand that feeds him." - vv?
"I don't know how it is to be dead. I haven't been dead yet." Joe Paterno
"up a tree without a paddle" - ?Sara Jones
"keep your ear to the grindstone" - ella wheaton at a director's meet ~9404
"Malapropinisms" - Elaine Mariolle
"I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankel." - Molly Ivins
"Throw caution to the wolves." - ?
"He smokes like a fish." - ?
"I know this town like the back of my head." - ?

"~Quarks are the dreams that stuff is made of." - ?

"Opinions too cheap to meter." - ?

"If all else fails, read the directions." - ?

"Reevaluate your basic assumptions" - ?

"Beware of inevitable disaster" - Peter Weinberger?

"KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid " - ?

"If it's not broke, don't fix it" - ?
"If it's broke, don't fix it - do something else" @OSF 920204

"It's too bad people can't be just all one way so you can feel just all one way about them" - John Brillhart

"It's a good day to die" - Little Big Man

"The truth shall make you free" - ?

"You can't step in the same river twice" - a Greek philosopher
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." - Heraclitus

"You can't step in the same river once" - one of his pupils? (Twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that Heraclitus's words were an understatement if he had ever seen one. Actually, you can never even step in the same river once, for there is no "same river.")

"Moderation in all things" - "Anything worth doing is worth over-doing" - ?

"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" - ?

"If you can't say something good, don't say anything at all" - ?

"If you can't say something good, come sit by me." - Roosevelt's daughter

"Blessed are they
who have nothing to say
(and can't be persuaded to say it)"
- heard around the Vaughan family when I was very young

"Silence is golden, speech is silver"
means that saying nothing is preferable to speaking.
The origin of this proverb has been obscured by time but there are versions dating back to ancient Egypt.
In 1831, the poet, Thomas Carlyle, translated it into English.

I prefer simply
"Silence is golden"

"A legend in her own mind" - said of Jackie Phelan at EBTC ~8902

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." - Rear Admiral Grace Hopper as quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine (July 1986)

"It (heroin) reduces the complex algebra of life to + and -." - Burroughs in the Naked Lunch

"Honesty is the best policy" - ?

"Live and let live. " - ?

"It is every man's Christian duty to mind his own business" - (vs brother's keeper) RC Miller?

"They take the bedroom and rearrange it - sometimess they don't even think it's strange, living that way" - Joy of Cooking

"I've been siftin' through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
And it was one that happened so long ago "
Kate Wolf - Across the great divide.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" - Janice Joplin?

"Life is easy when you have a dragon to slay" - vv?

"~Easy to tear things down" - Brillhart

"Often in life we thrash around just trying to get the job done when we could make things much easier simply by aiming for perfection." - Richard Todd, article in This World 920105

"Nothing amuses more harmlessly than computation, and nothing is oftener applicable to real business or speculative inquiries. A thousand stories which the ignorant tell, and believe, die away at once when the computist takes them in his grip." - Samuel Johnson, Letter to Sophia Thrale (at Bath), July 24, 1783

"If they want to make progress in the war on drugs, they are going to have to improve reality." - ?

"Things are as they are and will end as they must" - Aeschylus

"The disorder is more apparent than real" - Walt Whitman?

"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will become the present, and respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible." - ?

"What we really need is a magic bullet that will cure all these panaceas" - terrain, Jan 96, p37

"Nibbled to death by ducks" - Walt Loew

"Shoveling Shit against the tide" - Melvin Peterson?

"Living in cyberia" - title of a talk at UC

"It is Unix. It is possible to overcome any number of these bogus features." - Peter Weinberger

"If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there." - K Thompson

"I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." - anon.

"The Analytical Engine weaves Algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." - Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace

"It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us - the high, the low, the rich , the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage - may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss -- except the inventor of the telephone." - Mark Twain, 1890

"The future isn't what it used to be." - Arthur C. Clarke
"The future is not what it used to be." - Paul Valery, quoted in Sci Amer, Sept 1995, p57.

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." - Calvin Trillin

Please send comments (or contributions) to: vance@berkeley.edu
Last updated: 240611.