The Wisdom of Insecurity

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o´-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Precious stone

“To have a few precious stones is better than to have many pebbles. If everyone became a precious stone, then the stones would lose their value.”

Golden rules strikes back!

"In the world of play, like the world of dreams, there is no law of gravity, no death or taxes -and no insurmountable conflicts."

"If we happened to have three arms we´d cut one off rather than politely but firmly insist on a jacket with three sleeves."


-Wishcraft, un libro muy famoso sobre autoayuda. Me lo compré leyendo reseñas en internet y hasta el momento, aunque lo acabo de comenzar no me ha decepcionado. :)

Chapter Fourteen

Another pleasant and uneventful day spent largely in the pursuit of knowledge! I am beginning to feel like some old scholar. I can understand the attraction, suddenly, in the pursuit of information for its own sake. In a way, of course, it is an escape - I can see that even the most sophisticated sort of academic activity is at least in part a rejection of the realities of ordinary living.

-Moorcock en The Dark Corridor.

Hoy fue mi último día en Amazon porque se me venció el contrato, otra vez no sé que hacer con mi vida por si me quieren contratar para fiestas. Es gracioso como siempre que leo Moorcock paso por fases tan raras en mi vida. Aunque por ahora tengo plata :3

Bolis sigue durmiendo

I think I could turn and live with animals, they`re so

     placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania

      of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived

      thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. 

Live a good life. If there are Gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are Gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no Gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius

Vieran que la otra vez en SJO1 pensaba que nunca he sido más religioso que ahora que soy ateo. No sé si me explico.  

Huxley about life and women

"If I am to be remembered at all I would rather it should be as "a man who did his best to help the people" that by any other title."


-Amiguillo de Darwin que solo tuvo de educación 2 años de escuela pero que aún así se convirtió en profesor de ciencia. --> Persona interesante.

"Girls have been educated either to be drudges or toys, beneath men; or a sort of angels above him...
The possibility... that women are meant... to be men's comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar on that equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls." "Their hair will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being no brains within."

Shadows of forgotten ancestors: God

"Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents -about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault.
We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.
As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride."

There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall,

There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall, so many laws to keep you from experience. All these cities I have been in the last few weeks make me fully understand the cozy, stifling state in which most people pass through life. I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers-by will drop a coin into my cup.

-Henry Rollins

Quien dijo muchos golden rules

• Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
• Renew thyself completely each day
• Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
• The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
• My greatest skill in life has been to want but little.
• If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
• It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
  Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
• Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
• You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
• How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
• I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
• I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
  If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
• That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
• One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.
• I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into  its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains
• As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
• It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
• We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.
• To be awake is to be completely alive.  I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
• All good things are wild and free.
• “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and  endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a  success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will  pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will  begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be  expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he  will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

-Henry David Thoreau

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

 - Apple Inc. 

Y ésta me encantó:

“Half the world laughs at the other half, though all are fools. Either everything is good or everything is bad, depending on the vote. What one sues, another pursues. An insufferable fool, he who wishes the universe regulated according to his plans. Bliss does not derive from the pleasure of any one person. There are as many minds as there are heads, and as different. There is no weakness without its admirer. Don't worry that your ways displease some, because, without fail, they will please others. And don't let their approval of them go to your head, because still others will condemn them. Proper satisfaction may be taken only in the approval of persons of authority and those who have standing in their fields. Do not live by the sanction of any one voice, or of any one custom, or of any single period.”

― Baltasar Gracian

Thomas Jefferson

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

Me encanta lo verdaderamente visionarios que eran los presidentes gringos

Algunas citas de Miles Davis

 "Hay muchos buenos músicos, es evidente, pero pocos son originales. El trabajo básico hay que hacerlo con el sonido. El sonido es tu voz, tienes que buscarlo. Tocan notas originales, sin duda, pero no tienen un sonido propio. No es muy difícil tocar notas originales. El sonido, es otra cuestión. El sonido representa a uno mismo. Mira, escúchame: a la primera nota me reconoces, ¿no?, sabes que soy yo. Eso es el sonido. Cada cual tiene trabajar su originalidad, sus raíces. A veces, cuando me escucho, me parece que sueno demasiado banal, demasiado blanco, así que vuelvo a trabajarlo. Es algo muy exigente. En la actualidad, los saxofonistas no buscan un sonido propio. O no lo encuentran. Todos copian el sonido de Coltrane. Hay muy pocos sonidos originales en la música creativa. Mucho perfeccionismo, eso sí, mucha reproducción, pero muy poco sonido propio. El sonido sólo puede surgir del grupo, hay que esforzarse muchísimo. Ahora hay mucha competitividad, una especie de rivalidad deportiva. Se busca la perfección para hacer dinero, pero no hay sonido. El sonido, el dibujo, la ropa que llevo sobre el escenario, forma parte de lo mismo, es la búsqueda de un sólo color. Todo contribuye a la expresión de lo que eres." (1984)

"Para tocar hay que tener a la vez imaginación y conocimientos. Si no, no vale la pena. Oigo a tíos que, si fueran boxeadores en vez de músicos, serían enviados a la lona, porque en boxeo no puedes hacer dos veces lo mismo."(1971)  

Algunas veces debes tocar por mucho tiempo para ser capaz de tocar como vos mismo. 

Lo que hay que juzgar en cualquier artista de jazz es: ¿Dónde está el proyecto y dónde las ideas?

The Fortress of the Pearl

"This was a court whose energies were not devoted to maintaining itself unchanged for eternity, but to every kind of new idea and lively, humane discussion, which welcomed fresh thought not as a threat to its existence but as a very necessity to its continued well-being, whose wealth was devoted to experiment in the arts and sciences, to supporting those who were needy, to aiding thinkers and scholars. The Bright Empire´s brightness would come no longer from the glow of putrefaction but from the light of reason and good will.
    This was Elric´s dream, more coherent now than it had ever been. This was his dream and it was why he traveled the world, why he refused the power which was his, why he risked his life, his mind, his love and everything else he valued, for he believed that there was no life worth living that was not risked in pursuit of knowledge and justice. And this was why his fellow countrymen feared him. Justice was not obtained, he believed, by administration but by experience. One must give up power if one was to achieve true justice. This was not the logic of the Empire, but it was the logic of one who truly loved the world and desired to see an age dawn when all the people would be free to pursue their ambitions in dignitiy and self-respect."

Maticé. Cuando Elric habla de Justicia se refiere al derecho a estar por encima de los demás (él era rey). Que el reino de Melniboné es un reino decadente y queda en zapote  no me recuerda ningún lugar porque es de un libro de fantasía.

Mas Buda

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It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

Mas golden rules chachos

Olvida por un momento lo que te falta y agradece lo que tienes.
-A. Jodorowsky.

About Inspiration

"Nothing in art is created without effort, and the painter´s ideas don´t come to him on wings while he dreams, either. The one may be more talented than the other, of course; but without untiring diligence, single-mindedness and a combative spirit, there can´t be any good results. All this talk about "inspiration" is nonsense"

-Arnold Böcklin segun Imaginative Realism de James Gurney


"Nada en el arte es creado sin esfuerzo, y las ideas del pintor no vienen a él en alas mientras sueña tampoco. Uno podrá ser mas talentoso que otro, por supuesto, pero sin incansable diligencia, resolución y un espiritu combativo no pueden haber buenos resultados. Toda esta platica sobre "inspiracion" no tiene sentido."

Here's a challenge "Never let your memories be greater than your dreams."

Leido en twitter

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"Nunca dejes que tus recuerdos sean mas grandes que tus sueños"

Neil Gaiman sobre Will Eisner

No puedo quitarme de la cabeza esta frase del apendice de Will Eisner: A Spirited life de Bob Andelman. Gaiman sobre Eisner:

"Over the years, one of the things I have loved about Will is having conversations with him about whatever we are doing or whatever is happening and he is probably the only person in comics who is capable of saying, ´Of course, they tried that in 1947, but they did it like this and it worked.´

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"A través de los años, una de las cosas que he amado sobre Will es tener conversaciones con él sobre lo que sea que estamos haciendo o lo que sea que está pasando y el es probablemente la única persona en los comics que es capaz de decir: ""Por supuesto, eso lo intentaron en 1947, pero lo hicieron así y funcionó.""