मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Are you ready for Eternity?

Anton Chekhov in 'The Three Sisters' (Tri sestry), 1901: "Well, maybe we’ll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we’ll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it - I don’t know. But life will be the same - difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They’ll still be scared of death, and won’t want to die.”

महाभारत १/१/२४७: कालमूलमिदं सर्व भावाभावौ सुखासुखे॥

(Mahabharat 1/1/247: Living and death, happiness and sadness all originate in time.)

महाभारत १२/२२७/५६: कालेनाभ्याहताः सर्वे कालो हि बलवत्तरः॥

(Mahabharat 12/227/56: Time has killed all. Time is the most powerful.)

Simone Weil:

“All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.”

Roger Penrose:

"So this means that in a sense, the present past and future are out there, and that also gives us a very deterministic view of the world. We have no control of what happens in the future because its all laid out. I think the trouble that people have with this idea is that you think the future is under your control, to some degree, and so this means that if the future's laid out then in a sense its not under your control.

The question of the passage of time is something the scientists have rather set aside, and taking the view that its not really physics, it's a subjective issue; and subjective questions are not part of science. Now when you start talking about phenomena like one's own perception of the passage of time, then that is a subjective thing. And that's almost a taboo subject for science because it's subjective. The physical world at least according to Relativity, is out there, and there is no flow of time, it's just there; whereas our feeling (we have this feeling of the passage of time) are intimately connected to our perceptions."


Artist: Robert J Day, The New Yorker, December 4 1943

Mark Twain has tried to answer the question:

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

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