Quotes4study

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

George Bernard Shaw

>Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Betty Friedan

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.

Charles Lindbergh

Oxygen is a very toxic gas and an extreme fire hazard.  It is fatal in

concentrations of as little as 0.000001 p.p.m.  Humans exposed to the

oxygen concentrations die within a few minutes.  Symptoms resemble very

much those of cyanide poisoning (blue face, etc.).  In higher

concentrations, e.g. 20%, the toxic effect is somewhat delayed and it

takes about 2.5 billion inhalations before death takes place.  The reason

for the delay is the difference in the mechanism of the toxic effect of

oxygen in 20% concentration.  It apparently contributes to a complex

process called aging, of which very little is known, except that it is

always fatal.

However, the main disadvantage of the 20% oxygen concentration is in the

fact it is habit forming.  The first inhalation (occurring at birth) is

sufficient to make oxygen addiction permanent.  After that, any

considerable decrease in the daily oxygen doses results in death with

symptoms resembling those of cyanide poisoning.

Oxygen is an extreme fire hazard.  All of the fires that were reported in

the continental U.S. for the period of the past 25 years were found to be

due to the presence of this gas in the atmosphere surrounding the buildings

in question.

Oxygen is especially dangerous because it is odorless, colorless and

tasteless, so that its presence can not be readily detected until it is

too late.

        -- Chemical & Engineering News February 6, 1956

Fortune Cookie

We thrive on euphemism.  We call multi-megaton bombs "Peace-keepers", closet

size apartments "efficient" and incomprehensible artworks "innovative".  In

fact, "euphemism" has become a euphemism for "bald-faced lie".  And now, here

are the euphemisms so colorfully employed in Personal Ads:

EUPHEMISM            REALITY

-------------------        -------------------------

Excited about life's journey    No concept of reality

Spiritually evolved        Oversensitive

Moody                Manic-depressive

Soulful                Quiet manic-depressive

Poet                Boring manic-depressive

Sultry/Sensual            Easy

Uninhibited            Lacking basic social skills

Unaffected and earthy        Slob and lacking basic social skills

Irreverent            Nasty and lacking basic social skills

Very human            Quasimodo's best friend

Swarthy                Sweaty even when cold or standing still

Spontaneous/Eclectic        Scatterbrained

Flexible            Desperate

>Aging child            Self-centered adult

Youthful            Over 40 and trying to deny it

Good sense of humor        Watches a lot of television

Fortune Cookie

"I'm a doctor, not a mechanic."

        -- "The Doomsday Machine", when asked if he had heard of

           the idea of a doomsday machine.

"I'm a doctor, not an escalator."

        -- "Friday's Child", when asked to help the very pregnant

           Ellen up a steep incline.

"I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer."

        -- Devil in the Dark", when asked to patch up the Horta.

"I'm a doctor, not an engineer."

        -- "Mirror, Mirror", when asked by Scotty for help in

           Engineering aboard the ISS Enterprise.

"I'm a doctor, not a coalminer."

        -- "The Empath", on being beneath the surface of Minara 2.

"I'm a surgeon, not a psychiatrist."

        -- "City on the Edge of Forever", on Edith Keeler's remark

           that Kirk talked strangely.

"I'm no magician, Spock, just an old country doctor."

        -- "The Deadly Years", to Spock while trying to cure the

           aging effects of the rogue comet near Gamma Hydra 4.

"What am I, a doctor or a moonshuttle conductor?"

        -- "The Corbomite Maneuver", when Kirk rushed off from a

           physical exam to answer the alert.

Fortune Cookie

Little attention is nowadays paid to Goethe's work in other fields, work which he himself in some cases prized more highly than his poetry. It is only as an illustration of his many-sidedness and his manifold activity that we now turn to his work as a statesman, as a theatre-director, as a practical political economist. His art-criticism is symptomatic of a phase of European taste which tried in vain to check the growing individualism of Romanticism. His scientific studies and discoveries awaken only an historical interest. We marvel at the obstinacy with which he, with inadequate mathematical knowledge, opposed the Newtonian theory of light and colour; and at his championship of "Neptunism," the theory of aqueous origin, as opposed to "Vulcanism," that of igneous origin of the earth's crust. Of far-reaching importance was, on the other hand, his foreshadowing of the Darwinian theory in his works on the metamorphosis of plants and on animal morphology. Indeed, the deduction to be drawn from Goethe's contributions to botany and anatomy is that he, as no other of his contemporaries, possessed that type of scientific mind which, in the 19th century, has made for progress; he was Darwin's predecessor by virtue of his enunciation of what has now become one of the commonplaces of natural science--organic evolution. Modern, too, was the outlook of the aging poet on the changing social conditions of the age, wonderfully sympathetic his attitude towards modern industry, which steam was just beginning to establish on a new basis, and towards modern democracy. The Europe of his later years was very different from the idyllic and enlightened autocracy of the 18th century, in which he had spent his best years and to which he had devoted his energies; yet Goethe was at home in it. Entry: GOETHE

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 12, Slice 2 "Gloss" to "Gordon, Charles George"     1910-1911

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