Polinius' Advice to Laertes

Hamlet 
Act 1 Scene 3

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

Puppets and Machines

“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”

“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.

“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”

                            Kurt Vonnegut
                        Breakfast of Champions 

Tao Te Ching

"The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name." 

1.

When the Master governs, the people 

are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved. 

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

If you don’t trust the people, 

you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn’t talk, he acts. 

When his work is done,
the people say, ”Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!” 

2.

Throw away holiness and wisdom, 

and people will be a hundred times happier. 

Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.

If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle 

and let all things take their course. 

3.

He who stands on tiptoe 

doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead

doesn’t go far.

He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is. 

He who has power over others 

can’t empower himself.

He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
If you want to accord with the Tao, 

just do your job, then let go. 

4.

The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable, 

true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest are seems unsophisticated,

 the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish. 

5.

If you want to be a great leader, 

you must learn to follow the Tao. 

Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts, 

and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have, 

the less virtuous people will be. 

The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be. 

The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says: 

I let go of the law,
and people become honest. 

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good, 

and the good becomes common as grass.

6.

The gentlest thing in the world 

overcomes the hardest thing in the world. 

If you look to others for fulfillment, 

you will never truly be fulfilled.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

The more you know, 

the less you understand.

Seeing into darkness is clarity. 

Knowing how to yield is strength. 

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.

Those who know don’t talk. 

Those who talk don’t know. 

Not-knowing is true knowledge. 

Presuming to know is a disease. 

                                                                      Lao Tzu

Kafka on the Shore

Observer by H. Koppdelaney

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in , and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.


And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.


And once again the storm is over and you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about,"


                                                                        "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami

The Crunch by Charles Bukowski

too much too little 

too fat
too thin
or nobody. 

laughter or
tears 

haters
lovers 

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks 

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins. 

an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe. 

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock 

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love. 

people just are not good to each other
one on one. 

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor. 

we are afraid. 

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners 

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides. 

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone 

untouched
unspoken to 

watering a plant. 

people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other. 

I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be. 

but sometimes I think about
it. 

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone. 

too much
too little 

too fat
too thin
or nobody 

more haters than lovers. 

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad. 

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance. 

there must be a way. 

surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of. 

who put this brain inside of me? 

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance. 

it will not say
"no." 

The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

Fabian Perez

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

What I believe in - by Neil Gaiman

Levi van Veluw, Landscape, 2008

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. 

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. 

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. 

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. 

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. 

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. 

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. 

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. 

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. 

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. 

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." 


                                                                                                                        Neil Gaiman - " American Gods"