Shane Stone > Shane's Quotes

“Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.”
― Farley Mowat

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
― Herbert Simon

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
― Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

“It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.”
― Roger Scruton

“I'm not telling you it's going to be easy - I'm telling you it's going to be worth it.”
― Art Williams

“The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

“The intensity and excitement which accompanies moments of infatuation is frequently relative to the degree of loneliness and isolation which has been previously experienced.”
― Erich Fromm

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”
― Savielly Tartakower

“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one”
― Confucius

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
― William James, Is Life Worth Living?

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”
― Jean-Luc Picard

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
― Lao Tzu

“There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps – and the road-map is first among them – encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places