PERFECT Sense 2

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Charles Fort









Northern Lights, Norway 2010

PERFECT Louis

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
Jules Verne

(Welcome to the world, Louis)

PERFECT Peace

In order for the world to become peaceful, people must become more peaceful. Among mature people war would not be a problem - it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the things which make war. However, people can mature just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and our leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and set up better institutions. It always comes back to the thing so many of us wish to avoid: working to improve ourselves.
Peace Pilgrim (Mildred Lisette Norman)

PERFECT Roma

Jazz attracted me because in it I found perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn't have.
Django Reinhardt

PERFECT Einstein

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Albert Einstein

PERFECT Big Easy

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian

PERFECT Roots

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.
Albert Szent-Györgyi

Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt

PERFECT Miss iss ippi (Ippi ssi ssiM)

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.
Mark Twain

PERFECT Song for the Times

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run,
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a thing in all your life,
As three blind mice.
English Nursery Rhyme

PERFECT Musing

Why is it that we focus so much on our beginnings/early years as the imprint for moving forward? You were abandoned as a child. Your father committed suicide when you were a teenager. Your mother was an alcoholic narcissist. Your father a philanderer. Your grandfather a swindler. Psychiatry brings us back to visit the injustices as if in returning to the past you can alter it. Instead you remain there, feeling those sad, lonely, angry, bitter emotions. I say, bummer that you had a tough beginning. Because, pal, it's just the beginning. If you live a long life, you're going to encounter an incredible amount of unpleasantness, death, deception, and abandonment. You're going to feel immense grief and the foundation for much of your later adulthood is going to be built on the missing of important people in your life. And yet, you go on.

Just sayin.

Me, as much as I've suffered in the past, I have absolutely no desire to linger there. I would rather be, as in this gorgeous Edmund Dulac illustration: She Was Always Picking Flowers.

PERFECT Will

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea we are now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare

PERFECT Poison

Go and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils' foot ...
John Donne