Michael Austin > Michael's Quotes

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”
― Joseph Conrad

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”
― Daniel Dennett

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“None of us wants to reject our core assumptions about the universe and start all over again. It is hard work, and it deprives us of nearly everything that makes us feel secure.”
― Michael Austin, Re-reading Job Understanding the Ancient World s Greatest Poem

“If money is in essence transferable credit—rather than a commodity medium of exchange, as the academic economists insisted—then fundamentally different factors explain the economy’s demand for it. Meeting demand for commodities is a simple matter of ensuring a sufficient supply on the market. When it comes to transferable credit, however, volume alone is not enough: the creditworthiness of the issuer and the liquidity of the liability come into play. And both these factors are determined not technologically or physically but by the general levels of trust and confidence.”
― Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorized Biography

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

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― Walter Brueggemann, Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent

“The church—the disciples—are always a little slow, unwilling to learn what the new data of Jesus means, unwilling to recognize that the world is changed by Jesus, unable to act differently in the new world of Jesus. The disciples seem often to act as though Jesus did not really matter; they act as though the world were still bound in scarcity and anxiety and fearfulness and hoarding.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent

“There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. Báyò Akómoláfé”
― Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life