Pjes > Pjes's Quotes

“Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
― franz kafka

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor Adorno

“Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.”
― Avicenna

“I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“We know ourselves only
as far as we've been tested.
I tell you this
from my unknown heart.”
― Wislawa Symborska

“Psychoanalysis, as well as death, becomes a bourn from which no traveler returns: and like anything indulged in for a long time, concern over the small change of life becomes a habit, and an irritating one, that inhibits interest and taking part in the wider world. It is a poor center of a man’s attention, himself; compared with psychoanalysis, haruspicy or hepatoscopy (divination by entrails or the liver of sacrificed animals) is harmless to the character, for though it is absurd, it at least is limited in time.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“(Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man’s prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History

“If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

“My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

“We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives”
― Stephen Jay Gould