After-Orts #130

Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say they are accepted by almost everybody unquestioningly, and they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life, in the West, is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse which only the poet can distinguish from prose.
​     — Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World  (1951)
 

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Ask a bird, ‘What is necessary for flight?’ and it will say, ‘Food and rest.’ 

Humans were taking pills long before there were any effective ones. Likewise, we have not yet given up on prayer.

     — JPJ, Last Aphorisms, quoted in Sarah Manguso, In Short: Thirty-six Ways of Looking at the Aphorism, in Harper’s magazine 
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/09/in-short/
 

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When you’re snowbound and have a stamp, it begins to seem necessary to write a letter.
     — Constance Beresford Howe, The Book of Eve  (thanks, DK!)