Sinestesia > Sinestesia's Quotes

“A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
― Jacques Derrida

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back, I see a pattern.”
― Benoît B. Mandelbrot

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”
― Benoît Mandelbrot

“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”
― E.M. Forster

“Sometimes translation stops you understanding.”
― China Mieville, Embassytown

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“Se tens um coração de ferro, bom proveito. O meu, fizeram-no de carne e sangra todo dia.”
― José Saramago

“Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence, and to suspend our judgment when we have not.”
― John Lubbock, The Use Of Life

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for”
― John Lubbock

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.”
― Democritus

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know”
― Bertrand Russell

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
― Bertrand Russell

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
― Noam Chomsky

“How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”
― Noam Chomsky

“Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”
― Noam Chomsky

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies