S.L. Myers

“Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade.

And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the factory gates in a Mélies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“Scientists would much rather contemplate indeterminism than free will because then they can continue to avoid any notion of mind existing in its own right. The entire way scientists think is predicated on ensuring that meaning, purpose, mind, teleology, and free will never enter their thoughts or theories. It’s literally verboten to allow these to enter science. Science is an ideology. It’s utterly dogmatic. It has an absolutely rigid and wrong worldview that it refuses to alter. It’s as bad as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Karmism. The way Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and Brian Cox contemplate the world is from the primary assumption that mind, teleology and free will are false. So, it’s no surprise whatsoever to find these people arguing against mind, teleology and free will. They have to in order to cling to their quasi-religious faith in scientific materialism.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”
― Richard P. Feynman