#caution

If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. ↗

— John Gray

#experience #life-lessons #wisdom #experience

Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need... if you throw salt over your shoulder... if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#help #precaution #superstition #family

(about William Blake) [Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death." And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral." But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All! ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#creativity #faith #freedom #art

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#avoided #better #dangers #destiny #exceeds

Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs. ↗

— Tom Waits

#goodbye #most #road #songs #tales

As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million. ↗

— George Wald

#as far as #attack #conservative #estimates #everything

Precaution is better than cure. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#cure #precaution #than

In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels. ↗

— Gerald Clarke

#causes #caution #channels #memoirs #much

Distrust and caution are the parents of security. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#distrust #parents #security

Once upon a time there was an old country, wrapped up in habit and caution. We have to transform our old France into a new country and marry it to its time. ↗

— Charles de Gaulle

#country #france #habit #into #marry