silence cannot be misquoted

[arethinn]

In re: last post (which some of you will not have seen), I decided to look up Voltaire (the French guy, that is, not the goth musician) and see if "Anything too stupid to be said is sung" is in fact attributed to him. Apparently it is, and there's some other good ones on that page, such as:

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." --I'd wonder if he'd been reading Crowley, if he hadn't died in 1778.

"Regimen is superior to medicine" and "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

and
"Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

I wonder if there's such a thing as "quote-o-mancy", by use of such devices as the random selection page? Maybe that's just a variation of bibliomancy.

Comments

[waywind.livejournal.com]

High noise-to-signal ratio when attempting Livejournal bibliomancy: standard bibliomancy tends to work like that, too. Therein lies the challenge of freeform bibliomancy: figuring out whether the "noise" signifies something, and what. Personally, I've either never had very good results with bibliomancy, though that may be that I'm not sharp enough at making sense of the "noise." You've got to get really creative with getting meaning out of structureless random results. A journal involving social drama of total strangers could be seen as significant, as much so as the Tarot card with a picture of some guys hitting each other with sticks. Not too different from what's going on. A journal which is inscrutable to you (because its user hasn't posted, has it friends-locked, or is writing only in a foriegn language) may be seen as equivalent as the blank Futhark rune, which represents that your answer is not to be revealed at this time, for mysterious divine reasons, sort of thing. (It is controversial whether there should even be a blank Futhark rune, historically; some guy inserted it when he was reconstructing the runes for divinatory use.)

This is, of course, silly. It's just an interesting exercise to figure out how you can divine from anything, once you've gotten used to the overall structure of how bibliomancy-based divination tends to work. Historically, people have divined the future from much weirder things than random pages of strangers' journals. Shapes of livers, cracks on tortoise shells, flight patterns of birds. Apparently there was divination by cheese, but I haven't been able to find anything that tells more details on that.

I read an article a while ago (drat, where did I read that?) where a person was mentioned who, after familiarizing herself with Tarot, used her son's Pokemon cards for fortunetelling, having assigned meanings to the different cards. Bulbasaur represents a young, energetic person who is associated with the element of water. There's some non-face cards to deal with less personalized situations.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Apparently there was divination by cheese

I suppose it's Gouda enough for who it's for.