1.
Life is very short, and there's no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
(from the Lennon/McCartney song We can work it out).
2.
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
Absolutely brilliant. I found it (long ago) written under a large photograph of Einstein. The quote is supposed to belong to him.
Life is very short, and there's no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
(from the Lennon/McCartney song We can work it out).
2.
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
Absolutely brilliant. I found it (long ago) written under a large photograph of Einstein. The quote is supposed to belong to him.
About 1.
ReplyDeleteA favourite of mine too. How tedious life can become if you don't get rid of its distractions, and how miserable if you let your energy concentrate on active disliking, or worse, hating. To prevent this, and to make good use of another piece of lyrics, one should be regularly asking himself, and acting in consequence, Should I stay or should I go?
About 2:
Agreed it's a magnificent statement. My comment, though, it's about its attributed source, Einstein. If Einstein and Churchill would have originated all the citations attributed to them, one wouldn´t have had the time to revolutionize science and the other to win the war that saved us from utter misery!
It occurs to me this can be thought of in terms of memes. The meme 'The most important human endeavor...' knows for sure that, if attributed to an unknown, its chance of transmission is meager, so it attaches himself to a prestigious name to boost its odds of survival.
Memes' idea is fascinating. Susan Blackmore leads it (The Meme Machine)
Thanks for your comments, Eduard. My other commenter here, Fer, also shares your view on the wrong source of many a good quote attributed to Einstein ... :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out this meme's idea. I think I had already heard about it before but can't be completely sure. Maybe it was even you who told me about it sometime ago ... :)
Incidentally, the Susan Blackmore link you provided does not seem to work.
Yeah, I know. If you can edit the comments, just adding a 'd' to the end of the uri makes the job.
ReplyDeleteBut it's just a link to Amazon about the book, so I doubt whether it's worth the trouble, being so easy going there.
Now I'm going to try to disentangle the captcha, the bigger challenge about writing comments here in blogspot... :-)
Failed.
They've pitied me and presented me with a new, foolproof one, thank God.