Taken from “Book Review: But What If We’re Wrong?” by Ben Casnocha
I suspect most conventionally intelligent people are naïve realists, and I think it might be the defining intellectual quality of this era. The straightforward definition of naïve realism doesn’t seem that outlandish: It’s a theory that suggests the world is exactly as it appears.
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Any time you talk to police (or … [ Read more ]
Authors: Ben Casnocha, Chuck Klosterman
You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain linked together by cause and effect.
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Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain – that it may perhaps be this is not important – but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the … [ Read more ]
Author: Hermann Hesse | Subject: Uncategorized
Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.
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…one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, and though you might want to correct them, it doesn’t happen overnight, and if you try … [ Read more ]
Author: Haruki Murakami
Sadly it is not only the force of gravity we get used to as we grow up. The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world.
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Heraclitus pointed out that the world is characterized by opposites. If we were never ill, we would … [ Read more ]
Author: Jostein Gaarder | Subject: Uncategorized
All men are holy here, and there is nothing more irritating than a neighbor, equally holy, of a different faith.
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Humans can adapt to anything but uncertainty. The worst monsters are the ones we haven’t yet encountered.
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But then truth isn’t really the point of torture, given that the victim will say anything to get the pain to stop. Torture is about the … [ Read more ]
Author: William Dietrich
To Quart, faith was relative. Quart’s creed didn’t consist of revealed truths; it rested, rather, on the assumption that one had faith and acted accordingly. In this light, the Catholic Church from the start was to Quart what the army was to other young men: a place where rules provided most of the answers as long as one didn’t question the basic concept. In Quart’s … [ Read more ]
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the concerns of all humanity.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?
To ignore evil is to become … [ Read more ]
Authors: Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr. | Subject: Uncategorized
Character (personality?) is stronger than culture, and culture is stronger than ideology.
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We Westerners think binominally, in terms of a thing and its opposite. Therefore we can become interested in objects, acts, and ideas different from our own; and we can retain interest in an absolute opposite (things utterly different from our own experience). We can study and even empathize with an act, idea, or object … [ Read more ]
Author: Lawrence Tyler
To invent a story interesting in itself apart from the telling is a difficult thing, the power to do it is a gift of nature, it cannot be acquired by taking thought, and it is a gift that very few people have.
– from Introduction by Jane Smiley
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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that … [ Read more ]
Author: W. Somerset Maugham
That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing.
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The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
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These people fail to realize … [ Read more ]
Author: Yann Martel
Whatever the course of our lives, we should receive them as the highest gift from the hand of God, in which equally reposed the power to do nothing whatever for us. Indeed, we should accept misfortune not only in thanks, but in infinite gratitude to Providence, which by such means detaches us from an excessive love for Earthly things and elevates our minds to the
Author: Dava Sobel
from Author’s Commentaries:
We are indeed beings that are going to die. Therefore, the real struggle of man is not the strife with his fellowmen, but with infinity, and this is not even a struggle; it is, in essence, an acquiescence.
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The need of every civilized person: to maintain the boundaries of the known world.
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Don Juan said that the energetic fact which was the … [ Read more ]
Author: Carlos Castaneda
If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I’ve had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion – and that applies to … [ Read more ]
Author: Paulo Coelho
My findings show that concealed behind everything that one can designate as sexual there are far more significant connections–namely, the masculine protest concealed behind sexuality. By way of refuting the objection that masculine protest and repression are one and the same thing I have attempted to prove today that repression is only a partial effect of the masculine protest. […] One can no longer speak … [ Read more ]
Author: Josef Rattner | Subjects: People, Psychology | Behavior
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
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Each woman has a drawer marked “beautiful,” stuffed full of all sorts of meaningless junk. That’s my specialty. I pull out those pieces of junk one by one, … [ Read more ]
Author: Haruki Murakami
Notes taken from “Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Ben Casnocha
How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children … [ Read more ]
Authors: Ben Casnocha, Yuval Noah Harari | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Religion
What I want to say is, you get us thinking. We feel from your eyes what you see in your head. You see dead bodies, skeletons, and on top of that you want us to talk like we’re dying. I’ll start doing that a few seconds before I die, but until then I’m going to live and fuck and have a good time.
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We can … [ Read more ]
Author: Gil Courtemanche | Note(s): translated from the French by Patricia Claxton | Subjects: Excerpts, History, International, Novels
The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as we daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.
Authors: Christine Rosen, Daniel J. Boorstin | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture
“Purpose, Mr. Fortlow. Purpose. We’re all here for a reason. There is a divine plan. Good men want to find their place in that plan.”
“What there is is a plan, a direction that every living thing is moving toward. There’s a high sign but not everybody can see it.”
“No sir,” Socrates went on. “I wannna believe you. And I sure don’t wanna make … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Mosley | Subjects: Excerpts, Novels
Herman Melville observed that “a man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science…thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
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“I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes” – Walt Whitman
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“There are times,” said Somerset Maugham, “when I look over the various parts of my … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas A. Harris | Subjects: Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior