The Sequoia Farm: July 2013

Outbox

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."

— Neil Postman

ht: Joy Hutzler

The Late John Garfield Blues

"Old men sleep with their conscience at night; young kids sleep with their dreams."

— John Prine, from "The Late John Garfield Blues"

Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson offers an alternative view on creativity:

... & Consequences

"Whatever it costs to put the lie right, it will cost less than not putting it right."

— Douglas Wilson

"A decisive point is a place that is significant enough to matter to the enemy if you successfully take it, and insignificant enough to actually take. [..] To identify and go after a decisive point is the way to have a disproportionate impact."

— Douglas Wilson

Social Mercy

"Hell is social justice. We need social mercy."

— Douglas Wilson

Trouble either way...

"If you adopt the rhythm of stability, then change is a threat. Adopt the rhythm of change, though, and you'll get restless right on schedule."

— Seth Godin

Arms Race

"An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill."

— David Foster Wallace

The Elect Lady (II)

I finally finished reading George MacDonald's The Elect Lady. Slow and steady wins (or at least finishes) the race. Here are the quotes that stood out to me from the second half. Quotes from the first half of the book were earlier posted here. Also, note that I have suspended the numbering of "quote" posts on this blog, because it was a) dumb, and 2) ate up precious space on social media.

Surely the part of every superior is to help the life in the lower!
[T]here is no teacher like obedience, and no obstruction like its postponement.
To [a farmer] the weather is the Word of God, telling him whether to work or read.
[H]is fellow-Christians mourned over his failure and his death, not over his dishonesty!
Our own way of being wrong is all right in our own eyes; our neighbor's way of being wrong is offensive to all that is good in us.
[O]ur immediate business is to be right ourselves.
Suffering does not cause the vile thing in us—that was there all the time; it comes to develop in us the knowledge of its presence, that it may be war to the knife between us and it.
Who obeys, shines.
One ought not to be enriched by another's misfortune!
Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for ennui[.]
"I think [gambling] is the meanest mode of gaining or losing money a man could find. [...] There is no common cause, nothing but pure opposition of interest."
[I]f it is essential to any transaction that only one side shall gain, the thing is not of God.
It is an argument for God, to see what fools those make of themselves who, believing there is a God, do not believe in Him—children who do not know the Father. Such make up the mass of church and chapel goers.
[H]e was as indifferent to the praise or blame of what is called the public, as if that public were indeed—what it is most like—a boy just learning to read. Yet it is the consent of such a public that makes the very essence of what is called fame. How should a man care for it who knows that he is on his way to join his peers, to be a child with the great ones of the earth, the lovers of the truth, the Doers of the Will.
[H]e worshiped the god vilest bred of all the gods [greed], bred namely of man's distrust in the Life of the universe.
Right opinion, except it spring from obedience to the truth, is but so much rubbish.
[T]hey that will not awake and arise from the dead must be flung from their graves by the throes of a shivering world.
The thief who is trying to be better is ages ahead of the most honorable man who is making no such effort.
When I see a man lifting up those that are beneath him, not pulling down those that are above him, I will believe in his communism. Those who most resent being looked down upon, are in general the readiest to look down upon others.
I don't wonder at God's patience with the wicked, but I do wonder at His patience with the pious!