Quotes

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France

"Our cave-dwelling ancestors had just as big brains as we have, and since they didn't spend their evenings watching TV, I'm sure they asked questions like “What's all that stuff up there in the sky?” and “Where does it all come from?”. They'd been told beautiful myths and stories, but little did they realize that they had it in them to actually figure out the answers to these questions for themselves." -Max Tegmark, "Our Mathematical Universe"

"Je ne dors que d'un oeil; mon sommeil est très dur. Mon lit est rond, percé d'un trou pour le passage de la tete. Toutes les heures, un domestique prend ma température et m'en donne une autre." - Erik Satie, "Mémoires d'un Amnésique"

"Silkworms can be cultivated en masse, but territorialism and cannibalism preclude spider farming as a viable manufacturing approach." - Teule et al, PNAS 109

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett, "Worstward Ho"

"We are who we are in the darkness." - Anonymous

"In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? - But this is more pleasant. - Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?" - Marcus Aurelius

"物格而后知至 (Things being investigated, knowledge became complete)
知至而后意诚 (Knowledge being complete, thoughts were sincere)
意诚而后心正 (Thoughts being sincere, hearts were then rectified)
心正而后身修 (Hearts being rectified,persons were cultivated)
身修而后家齐 (Persons being cultivated, families were regulated)
家齐而后国治 ( Families being regulated, states were rightly governed)
国治而后天下平 (States being rightly governed, the world was at peace)" - 孔子 (Kongzi, aka"Confucious")

"Physicists advance by standing on one another's shoulders; psychologists advance by standing on one another's faces."- Anonymous

"Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only..." -William James, discussing the worldview of Gustav Fechner

"Freddy, as a younger man, I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful. I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent. I knew my limitations. We all have our limitations, Freddy. Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style were commodities that people desired. Freddy, what I am saying is: know your limitations. You are a moron." - Lawrence Jamieson, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

"Neurons are simply a species-specific set of symbols that Homo sapiens happens to construct in dealing with an objective reality that is surely not spatiotemporal and that is surely utterly different and far more complex than neurons. For most normal neuroscience research, it is a harmless fiction to pretend that neurons have genuine causal powers. However, when we try to solve the mind–body problem—that is, to understand the relationship between neural activity and conscious experience—and then proceed to assume that neurons really do have causal powers and really do, somehow, cause our conscious experiences, then suddenly the fiction is no longer harmless. It has halted progress on the mind–body problem for decades, even centuries." - from Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash's response to Edelman's critique of their 'interface theory' of perception

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

"A poor leader will tell you how many people work for them. A great leader will tell you how many people they work for." - Simon Sinek

"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman

"The author must shut his mouth when his work begins to speak." - Nietzsche

“Whenever any one speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently of man, as a belly with two requirements and a head with one; whenever any one sees, seeks and wants to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks “badly” - and not even “ill” - of man, then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a liar as the indignant man.” - Nietzsche (compare with Feynman's fooling quote above..)

"Finding out what you think is not the same as coming to a decision." - Tim Crane (paraphrase)

"While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." - Eugene V. Debs

"Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has drawn out your soul, what has commanded it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and by their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self." - F. Nietzsche [this might be a nice explanation of this page]

"Do you know why Einstein said the most original and profound things about space and time in our generation? Because he had learned nothing at all about the philosophy and mathematics of time and space." - David Hilbert

"The standard formulation of the ‘mind-body problem’ rests on a huge and wholly unjustified assumption (this assumption, in fact, is Descartes's deepest error). It is not content with the obvious truth that matter and consciousness seem to us to be utterly heterogeneous things. It slides on to the claim that matter and consciousness are in fact utterly heterogeneous things, in such a way that it is mysterious how one could ever be the basis or ‘realization’ of the other. It shifts from a harmless and true epistemological claim about how things seem to us to a hunking megatherial metaphysical claim about how things are in reality." - Galen Strawson, from his review of Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens"

"Who cares if Jesus told me how to live? What matters is that Jesus told me how to live forever!" - u/zelda-go-go

"Thus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was "Either Caesar or nothing", does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar." - Soren Kierkegaard

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." - Hermann Göring

"Croyant bien faire, presque à mon arrivée, ici-bas, je me mis à jouer quelques airs de Musique que j'inventai moi-même ...
   Tous mes ennuis sont venus de là." - Erik Satie

“We must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” - Elie Wiesel

"Outdoors all afternoon
under a gun-metal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about 
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour 
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire." - Stanley Kunitz

No comments:

Post a Comment