Apposite Apothegms

apothegm: a short, pithy, and instructive saying or formulation.

Collected by the Staff of Magellan's Log

It's more fun to go fast in a slow car than slow in a fast car.
                                                                             —Dan Neil.

I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.
                                                                                   —Jules Renard.

With delight I mock any religionist who demeans, besmirches, and vilifies faith with immersion in secular ambition. For the rest, I have only the most nearly perfect silence—like theirs—I can muster.
                                                                                   —Douglas Milburn.

The most ordinary conversation in the South has a theological basis.
             —Anonymous speaker, Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus.

Since these mysteries are beyond us, let’s pretend we’re organizing them.
                                                                                   —Cocteau.

It’s a good thing we die. Once on the moebius strip of ego there’s no other way off (countless religious and philosophical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding).
                                                                                   —DM.

The death penalty is not about dying. It's about how a society chooses to live."
                                                                                   —Rev. Carroll Pickett.

Embrace emphemerality. When you’re through, embrace the ephemerality of ephemerality.
                                                                                   —DM.

Extancy, then sentience, then self-awareness, then symbol manipulation, then what?
                                                                                   —DM.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
                                                                                   —Martin Amis.

The amount of damage we do to others is exceeded only by the amount of damage we do to ourselves and that in turn is exceeded only by the amount of sunlight reaching the bottom of the Mindanao Deep.
                                                                                   —DM.

I can’t see the point of being him.
                                —Elizabeth Jane Howard on Terry Eagleton.

After such a long night, some deny the dawn. Others flee it.
                                                                                   —DM.

The world provides plenty for man’s needs but not for his greed.
                                                                                   —Gandhi.

The only waste of time greater than discussing any organized religion is being one of its devotees.
                                                                                   —DM.

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.
                                                                                   —JG Ballard.

Religionists are freshmen who want high school to never end and who shape their lives on promises of a perfect eternal high school after death.
                                                                                   —DM.

An accurate way to judge the maturity, wisdom, and health of a society is to note in how much disrepute it holds people who accumulate large amounts of money.
                                                                                   —DM.

In culture, need and opportunity coincide at certain times to enable basic discoveries (fire, the wheel, the arch). If a basic discovery is not made at that time, work-arounds develop such that, no matter how clumsy, they obviate the need and the discovery is never made. Meso-Americans and the wheel. Present-day humans and… what?
                                                                                   —DM.

Suns do not make singular appearances. They return daily.
                                                                                   —DM.

Politics, like life, is a circus, The problem is, on some days it matters.
                                                                                   —DM.

The delight of every age is the latest products of our cleverness. The danger is, seduced by the new, we forget the wider excursions and discoveries of the old. In England in 1600 to lose oneself in words, in Vienna in 1800 in music, in America in 2000 in video.
                                                                                   —DM.

Attention, Deists! Self-shuffling atoms are the string on God’s finger. (It helps if you learn to squint your eyes.)
                                                                                   —DM.

Proportion trumps all. Even time.
                                                                                   —DM.

We reward those who catch glimpses of unseen countries with prizes, honors, and money while those who learn to live there pass largely unnoted.
                                                                                   —DM.

Named or unnamed, climbed or not, all Everests are equal.
                                                                                   —DM.

Let horrid jargon split the air,
And rive the nerves asunder;
Let hateful discord greet the ear
As terrible as thunder!
                                                                                   —William Billings.

END

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