Beloved asks for quotes...
and we (and I) oblige
"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." --Sigmund Freud
“To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.”
--alan watts
"A cluster of composite, endlessly altering circumstances and functions which we address as 'I'.-- the character Herman Mussert, in Cees Noooteboom's "The Following Story"
"We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know."
--richard feynman
"You and your friends can do anything that the great religions and empires and racial groups have done in the name of their Gods. You can choose your Gods to be smart, compassionate, cute and goofy. Begin by creating a cult comprised of your family and friends. Then develop a personal mythology and write your own New Testament."
--timothy leary
"Man is at his most complete when his imagination is at its most intense. Imagination is the power of prehension; without it, man would be an imbecile, without memory, without forethought, without power of interpreting what he sees and feels. The higher the form of life, the greater its power of prehension; and in man, prehension becomes a conscious faculty, which can be labelled imagination. If life is to advance yet a stage higher, beyond the ape, beyond man the toilet or even man the artist, it will be through a further development of the power of prehension. This craving for greater intensity of imagination is the religious appetite."
-- Colin Wilson riffing on William James in "Religion and the Rebel"
"In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference."
--Douglas Hofstadter
“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
~Ram Dass
The Way is gained by daily loss,
loss upon loss until
at last comes rest.
By letting go, it all gets done;
the world is won by those who let it go!
--lao tzu
"i think of the mind as an endless committee meeting with barely-relating employees sitting around a table, each with their own concerns. one of them is screaming "we're all gonna DIE!" at random intervals, some of whom are desperately trying to get us laid
religion takes that "gonna DIE!" fellow off in a corner and keeps him busy so the rest of us can get on with the more important thing. where it goes bad is when religion starts to gather more and more of the other employees into its corner, taking them out of the game. once the guy trying to get laid gets waylaid by Thou Shalt Not, its Game Over.
Oh, and occasionally we get some science done. if it helps us to get laid"
--RandomFactor
"is the purpose of babies just to make universes?"
--emlong
"what is a human being then?
'a seed'
a seed?
'an acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree"
"The Broken God" by david zindell
There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
--RAW
"So many giants and demons and always room for more in poor Tom's head. Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there!
But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."
--Tom O'Bedlam
"Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of "man" himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome..."
--richard tarnas
"we know that we cannot assume...that the features of a system which we observe in a measurement exists prior to the measurement...what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision...we are not just passive observers... "
--Anton Zelinger distilling the Kochen-Specker theorem
"We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as 'real' or 'only possible'; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself."
--Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrodinger
"the pluriality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real...the sum total of all minds is one..."
--Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrodinger
the city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities
-- peter calthorpe
nuclear energy is green. renewables are not green
-- jesse ausubel
"...the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities."
-- robert baker, one of two biologists who did a 15 year study on radiation effects in animals in chernobyl
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.[...]
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings."
--david foster wallace, 'this is water'
"Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. be kind"
--found on FB
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