touchstone quotations: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Perspective

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Perspective

I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
On the light pollution in New York City and the lack of starry nights in an urban sky; from Exceptional Research Opportunities Program Meeting, May 16, 2008

Source: haydenplanetarium.org

Joseph Campbell on Interesting Times

I have read somewhere of an old Chinese curse: "May you be born in an interesting time." This is a very interesting time. There are no models for anything that is going on. It is a period of free fall into the future, and each has to make his or her own way. The old models are not working; the new have not yet appeared. In fact, it is we who are even now shaping of the new in the shaping of our interesting lives. And, that is the whole sense (in mythological terms) of the present challenge: we are the ancestors of an age to come, the unwitting generators of its supporting myths, the mythic models that will inspire its lives.

Joseph Campbell
1904 - 1987
Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013