Robert Ferro > Robert's Quotes

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
― Jacques Derrida

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida

“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
― Jacques Derrida

“I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.”
― Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine

“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?”
― Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

“If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing or excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students?”
― Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.”
― Miss Piggy

“The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children. ”
― Jim Henson

“There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.”
― Jim Henson, Favorite Songs From Jim Henson's Muppets

“When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there. ”
― Jim Henson

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“I ask not for any crown
But that which all may win;
Nor try to conquer any world
Except the one within.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”
― Louisa May Alcott