Comments & Greek paintings, Greek artists: He who has the courage to laugh...

Poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Two Boats, oil on canvas

Giacomo Leopardi

To Himself

Now will you rest forever,
My tired heart. Dead is the last
deception,
That I thought eternal. Dead. Well I
feel
In us the sweet illusions,
Nothing but ash, desire burned out.
Rest forever. You have
Trembled enough. Nothing is worth
Thy beats, nor does the earth
deserve
Thy sighs. Bitter and dull
Is life, there is nought else. The
world is clay.
Rest now. Despair
For the last time. To our kind, Fate
Gives but death. Now despise
Yourself, nature, the sinister
Power that secretly commands our
common ruin,
And the infinite vanity of
everything.

Aphorisms

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much the master of the world as he who is ready to die.

You can be happy indeed if you have breathing space from pain.

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

I get up and I bless the light thin clouds and the first twittering of birds, and the breathing air and smiling face of the hills.

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

Comments & Greek paintings, Greek artists: Civilization is the limitless multiplication...

Writers & Greek painters, Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Two Ships, oil on canvas

A great writer...

A very intelligent man...

Enjoy...

Marc Twain
Quotations

Better a broken promise than none at all.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Buy land, they're not making it anymore.

By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

Comments & Greek painters, modern Greek artists: the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power...

Aphorisms & Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Green Boatι, oil on canvas

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
(Thomas Hobbes)

About the nature of the human kind...

Thomas Hobbes
Aphorisms

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.

Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present.

Gluttony is a lust of the mind.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Words are the money of fools.

Comments & modern Greek artists: The journey of the Universe...

Travel & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Departure, oil on canvas

To travel...

Far from every day life...

Far from homeland...

Far from earth...

The journey of the Universe and the "dark flow"...

Mysterious Cosmic 'Dark Flow' Tracked Deeper Into Universe (ScienceDaily - Mar. 11, 2010)

Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported.

"This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it go away," Kashlinsky said. "Now we see that it persists to much greater distances -- as far as 2.5 billion light-years away." The new study appears in the March 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The clusters appear to be moving along a line extending from our solar system toward Centaurus/Hydra, but the direction of this motion is less certain. Evidence indicates that the clusters are headed outward along this path, away from Earth, but the team cannot yet rule out the opposite flow. "We detect motion along this axis, but right now our data cannot state as strongly as we'd like whether the clusters are coming or going," Kashlinsky said.

The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.

Cosmologists regard the microwave background -- a flash of light emitted 380,000 years after the universe formed -- as the ultimate cosmic reference frame. Relative to it, all large-scale motion should show no preferred direction.

The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Because galaxy clusters don't precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster's individual motion.

This results in a minute shift of the microwave background's temperature in the cluster's direction. The change, which astronomers call the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (KSZ) effect, is so small that it has never been observed in a single galaxy cluster.

But in 2000, Kashlinsky, working with Fernando Atrio-Barandela at the University of Salamanca, Spain, demonstrated that it was possible to tease the subtle signal out of the measurement noise by studying large numbers of clusters.

In 2008, armed with a catalog of 700 clusters assembled by Harald Ebeling at the University of Hawaii and Dale Kocevski, now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the researchers applied the technique to the three-year WMAP data release. That's when the mystery motion first came to light.

The new study builds on the previous one by using the five-year results from WMAP and by doubling the number of galaxy clusters.

"It takes, on average, about an hour of telescope time to measure the distance to each cluster we work with, not to mention the years required to find these systems in the first place," Ebeling said. "This is a project requiring considerable followthrough."

According to Atrio-Barandela, who has focused on understanding the possible errors in the team's analysis, the new study provides much stronger evidence that the dark flow is real. For example, the brightest clusters at X-ray wavelengths hold the greatest amount of hot gas to distort CMB photons. "When processed, these same clusters also display the strongest KSZ signature -- unlikely if the dark flow were merely a statistical fluke," he said.

In addition, the team, which now also includes Alastair Edge at the University of Durham, England, sorted the cluster catalog into four "slices" representing different distance ranges. They then examined the preferred flow direction for the clusters within each slice. While the size and exact position of this direction display some variation, the overall trends among the slices exhibit remarkable agreement.

The researchers are currently working to expand their cluster catalog in order to track the dark flow to about twice the current distance. Improved modeling of hot gas within the galaxy clusters will help refine the speed, axis, and direction of motion.

Future plans call for testing the findings against newer data released from the WMAP project and the European Space Agency's Planck mission, which is also currently mapping the microwave background.

...as I was young and easy at the mercy of his means *

Yannis Stavrou, Red Ships, oil on canvas

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to to the farm forever fled from the childless land,

Oh as I was young and easy at the mercy of his means,

Time let me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea

______________________________

* Dylan Thomas, from "Fern Hill"