Philip > Philip's Quotes

“Life is diverse. Living is to live with difference. Anyone telling you that difference should be stamped out is stamping out life. Those people insisting that there are black and white answers to the difficult questions are stamping out the diversity that is inherent in life.”
― Omar Saif Ghobash, Letters to a Young Muslim

“I want you to be on the lookout for people who talk with unerring conviction and authority about what others should do. Especially about what others should do. These are the people who always seem to lead us into some kind of trouble.”
― Omar Saif Ghobash, Letters to a Young Muslim

“There is no knowledge that is wrong. Only knowledge that is difficult, troubling, enlightening, liberating, and intoxicating.”
― Omar Saif Ghobash, Letters to a Young Muslim

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”
― David McCullough, The Course of Human Events

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Dignity is your value, Jack. It’s something you and every living person have just because you are.” “Is that all?” I ask. “Isn’t that enough?” I’m quiet. “That’s plenty,” Dad tells me. “In fact, it’s everything. The dignity of others is how we know some actions are good and others bad. It’s how you know it isn’t right to steal, or to kill without grave reckoning, or to lie.” “You get all that from dignity?” “You do.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“I feel certain of this: I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I weren’t a reader. I don’t just mean because I enjoy reading or spend so much time with my books. I mean that from an early age, and without consciously intending to, the ideas I got from books formed the interior architecture of my mind.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

“As a devoted reader, I know what it means for books to shape you—the person you are, the person you were then. For readers, the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other readers you’ve been. Sometimes you think fondly of the readers you used to be; sometimes looking back makes you cringe a little. But they’re still here. They’re still you.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life