Practice

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

— Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, 1970

| Art · Quotations

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_EMWEA.jpg

  • Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
  • Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
  • 2746 = 2 + \sqrt{7\sqrt{4}}^{6} (Colin Rose)
  • RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
  • “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial

Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Unquote

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.” — G.K. Chesterton

| Quotations · Society

Misc

  • Samuel Johnson said that sending a timid boy to a public school is “forcing an owl upon day.”
  • Inscribed over the door of the library at Murcia, Spain: “Here the dead open the eyes of the living.”
  • TRICE in Pig Latin is ICE TRAY.
  • 35 × 1482 × 9760 = 3514829760 (Jean-Marc Falcoz)
  • “Mauve is pink trying to be purple.” — Whistler

Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake is a lake in Manitoba. Its name is Cree for “where the wild trout are caught by fishing with hooks.”

Muckanaghederdauhaulia, a townland in County Galway, means “pig-marsh between two sea inlets.”

Saaranpaskantamasaari, an island in northeastern Finland, means “an island shat by Saara.”

Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in South Australia. Its name means “where the devil urinates.”

(Thanks, Colin.)

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math

Unquote

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules-Alexis_Muenier_-_Le_Retour_des_Champs_-_2014.695.q_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art.jpg

“Home is the only place where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of, but the one place, if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.” — George MacDonald

| Quotations

Observations

Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal:

  • Birdsong is always in pitch. Birds sound wrong only when frightened.
  • The underbrush makes the light chubby.
  • A trotting dog: his hind legs knit and his forelegs crochet.
  • Night softens the mind’s irritations and inflames the body’s.
  • The mouth and eyes are each anagrams of the other.
  • An animal’s feet are as intelligent as a man’s hands.
  • Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
  • A cat purrs himself to sleep, being the only creature who sings his own lullaby.
  • Shadows round everything out. The lacework of light is based on a circular pattern.
  • Good taste has no fixed rules, though fashion has. Taste amounts to being fashionable with a sense of style.
  • The eyes of the overly fearful stammer.
  • Servants eventually come to resemble their masters. “Professional” churchgoers end up looking like priests.
  • Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.

And “Number is the alphabet of form, which is why children always want to touch whatever they count.”

| Quotations