For a while our Thursday quotes have relied on the “Thirstday” theme, but there are only so many good quotes about cocktails and drunks. Our well ran dry this week, so here are some quotes about metaphoric thirst:

Kissing is like drinking salted water: you drink and your thirst increases
-Chinese Proverb?

He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.
Baltasar Gracian

To be thirsty and to drink water is the perfection of sensuality rarely achieved. Sometimes you drink water; other times you are thirsty.
José Bergamín

Even some of the greatest philosophers realized that eventually you just have to get off your duff and plow through:

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
-Soren Kierkegaard

He who has a why to live can survive almost any how.
-Nietzsche

It’s easy to find dozens of Picasso quotes, but many of them are essentially Picasso talking about himself. We think these stand the test of time better than many…

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
-Pablo Picasso

Computers are Useless. They can only give you answers.
-Pablo Picasso

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
-Pablo Picasso

And this one…

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
-Pablo Picasso

… is fitting in light of how this one…

He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
-Pablo Picasso

…sounds so much like all of these.

Some great minds understood the importance of being yourself. Wait. Did we just list Richard Bach as a great mind?

Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
-Albert Einstein

Yes, everyone’s dying to be someone else, but I’ll live my life if it kills me.
-e.e. cummings

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.
-Richard Bach

The tangled – and crowded – web we weave…

35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (April 2011)

If you watched YouTube videos 24 hours a day it would take almost six years to watch all the video uploaded in one day (April 2011)

Assuming the information stored in a memory chip is comprised of 40,000 electrons, the total weight of all the information flowing across the internet would be two millionths of an ounce, or about the weight of a grain of sand.

If you printed Twitter, the 7 billion tweets would be roughly equal to 130,000 copies of the King James Bible (January 2010)

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind India and China.

The current addressing system used for the internet is running out of addresses in 2011. Not to worry. When the new system is fully operational, there will be enough addresses to individually tag every object in your immediate environment.

Google Books estimates there are about 129,865,000 books in existence, and they plan to scan them all. If you read one book a day, it would take you about 355,794 years to read them all.

It’s amazing how long it can take someone to tell you to use fewer words:

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
-H.W. Fowler

The truly brilliant do it better:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-Leonardo da Vinci

Men of few words are the best men.
-William Shakespeare

Or with a little irony:

Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire

Or just plain plainerer:

The shorter and the plainer the better.
-Beatrix Potter

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
-Lucretius

When it comes to quotes, there’s no sense getting all original about it. Paraphrasing will get you places. As Oscar Wilde said, “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit”. Here’s proof:

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal;
nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
-Thomas Jefferson

They can conquer who believe they can.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

They can because they think they can.
-Virgil

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
-Henry Ford

A lot of us feel dread on Monday because we’re thinking about what we think our boss or coworkers are thinking. The fact is, we don’t KNOW what they’re thinking, but it can’t be much better than what WE’RE thinking. They work at the same lousy place we do, right? Why not blaze your own trail? Maybe someday you’ll be quoted for it:

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
-Arthur C. Clarke

For the answer to last week’s question “What do peacocks and spiders have in common”, just jump to the end. And speaking of jumping, you’d think we would jump at the opportunity to share some Easter facts with you. But this easily heads into dangerous territory that pits science against religion, which inevitably leads to otherwise intelligent people quoting the ironically um… christened Christopher Hitchens. A Brit with all the intelligence and language skills of Oscar Wilde, and none of the charm or wit. And on the other side of this debate, the most important fact about Easter – a resurrection – has not been witnessed again for over 2,000 years, and is therefore full of the irony that it is a disputed fact that is the basis of an indisputable faith for many. See? I’m already getting in rough territory just trying to be reasonable. So we’ll just stick with the facts. There are about as many facts available about the name “Easter” and the Easter Bunny as there are about Santa Claus, but they (the bunny and the fat man) both seem to have been introduced in America by the Germans in the 19th century. The “Osterhase” was in fact a hare, not a rabbit. But let’s not split hares…

In 1953, it took 27 hours to create a Marshmallow Peep. Today it takes six minutes.

Easter eggs probably have their origin in the fact that eggs were forbidden to Catholics during the fast of Lent and therefore in abundance.

Funny bunny facts:

When petted, rabbits make a sound similar to purring, but it’s caused by grinding their teeth softly .

Predators can literally scare a rabbit to death.

Which is handy, because…

Rabbit meat is lower in fat, cholesterol and calories than chicken, pork and beef.

Rabbit meat is all white meat

But in spite of being so jumpy…

The only place a rabbit sweats is through the pads on its feet

And now, the answer to the question “What do peacocks and spiders have in common?” (more…)