The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley, r. Aug. 2016

p. xiii In creation there is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only progress and continuation but also impediment and limitation... not only value but also worthlessness.... It is true that individual creatures and men experience these things in most unequal measure, their lots being assigned by a justice which is curious or ver much concealed. Yet it is irrefutable that creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis. - Ken Barth

p. xx A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds. Without Prayer and Work, the Carnival laughter turns ugly, the comic obscenities grubby and pornographic, the mock aggression into real hatred and cruelty. (The hippies, it appears to me, are trying to recover the sense of Carnival which is so conspicuously absent in this age, but so long as they reject Work they are unlikely to succeed.) Without Laughter and Work, Prayer turns Gnostic, cranky, Pharisaic, while those who try to live by Work alone, without Laughter or Prayer, turn into insane lovers of power, tyrants who would enslave Nature to their immediate desires - an attempt which can only end in utter catastrophe, shipwreck on the Isle of the Sirens. - W. H. Auden

p. 32 I began dimly to remember a primitive dialogue as to whether God is a mist or merely a mist maker.... How else would so great a being, assuming his existence, be able throughly to investigate his world, or, perhaps, merely a world that he had come upon, than as he was now proceeding to do?

p. 69 By contrast, only two peoples in the world have known what it is to be alone: the polar Eskimos of the nineteenth century who thought they were the only men in the world and that the explorers who came to them were ghosts, and those inhabitants of the more remote Pacific islets who learned in astonishment that theirs was not the only land above the water that stretched, as they thought, to infinity.

p. 72 Man has always been a builder. Perhaps he has built best in loneliness. At least this appears to be the case in the isles of Polynesia.

p. 75 Finally, however, I sat alone with my glass, a little mellow, perhaps, enjoying the warmth of the fire and remembering the blue snowfields of the North as they should be remembered - in the comfort of warm rooms.

p. 88 We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle. It exists for a time molecularly and in no recognizable semblance to its adult condition. It instructs its way again into man or reptile.

p. 106 "We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely.

p. 110 There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.

p. 114 What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?

p. 140 The power to change is both creative and destructive - a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.

p. 161 [Anecdote about the sunflower on the boxcar, growing there all summer, until boxcar suddenly hooked up and moving and the flower dying, shedding seeds...] A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye - who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers - travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to reemerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."

p. 165 We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts. We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.

p. 167 The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.

p. 175 When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table.

p. 178 ...man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch.

p. 178 [French biologist Jean Rostand] knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more.

p. 189 It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."

p. 190 For this reason [Thoreau] tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.

p. 194 Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man.

p. 201 "There is no more fatal blunderer," [Emerson] protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."

p. 207 Even the extinct head have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence.

p. 210 Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event - the world of culture. The mundus alter - this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention - has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.

p. 220 Our lives are the creation of memory and the accompanying power to extend ourselves outward into ideas and relive them. The finest intellect is that which employs an invisible web of gossamer running into the past as well as across the minds of living men and which constantly responds to the vibrations transmitted through these tenuous lines of sympathy.

p. 226 ...each great novel is a separate and distinct world operating under its own laws with a flora and fauna totally its own. There is communication, or the work is a failure, but the communication releases our own visions, touches some highly personal chord in our own experience.

p. 236 It is not my intention here to decry learning, but only to say that we must understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make us ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual...

p. 236 We crossed the divide then, picking our way in places scoured by ancient ice action, through boulder fields where nothing moved, and yet where one could feel time like an enemy hidden behind each stone.

p. 242 If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon's airless craters, or in the road before our door. Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent, and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing.

p. 242 "The special value of science," a perceptive philosopher once wrote, "lies not in what it makes of the world, but in what it makes of the knower."

p. 244 In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed. It is our custom to deny this; we are men of precision, measurement and logic; we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. This, too, is a green island.

p. 244 I no longer believed that nature was either natural or unnatural, only that nature now appears natural to man. But the nature that appears natural to man is another version of the muskrat's world under the boat dock, or the elusive sparks over which the physicist made his trembling passage. They were appearances, specialized insights, but unreal because in the constantly onrushing future they were swept away.

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, r. Aug. 2016

p. 237 Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. - George Bernard Shaw

p. 244 The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. - Colin Wilson

p. 249 In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power. Don't wait until you need options to search for them.

p. 269 It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. - Paul Theroux

p. 290 Like all innovators ahead of the curve, you will have frightening moments of doubt. Once past the kid-in-a-candy-store phase, the comparative impulse will creep in. The rest of the world will continue with its 9-5 grind, and you'll begin to question your decision to step off the treadmill. Common doubts and self-flagellation include the following:
1) Am I really doing this to be more free and leak a better life, or am I just lazy?
2) Did I quit the rat race because it's bad, or just because I couldn't hack it? Did I just cop out?
3) Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities. It was easier at least.
4) Am I really successful or just kidding myself?
5) Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
6) Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I'm still not happy. Do I even deserve it?

p. 297 The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. - Thich Nhat Hanh

p. 315 Money doesn't change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.

p. 332 Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent; I would add that the second most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.