Sensemaking Quotes

“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“When we make stories, when we turn raw events into personal sagas, parables, tales, and anecdotes, we are often struggling to come to terms with one of the inescapably difficult and puzzling facts of existence. Storytelling is an attempt to deal with and at least partly contain the terrifyingly haphazard quality of life. Large parts of life, sometimes the mots crucial parts, depend on random happenings, contingency. A woman turns a corner, meets a strange man, two years later they marry, they have children together – and in twenty years, there are adults walking the earth who would not have existed if that woman had not turned that corner on that day. The human results of that apparently random event may go on for hundreds or even thousands of years, a single stray moment casting its shadow into an unimaginably long future. We can gaze on this fact with wonder; but we may also grow uneasy in contemplating it, because it emphasizes how little we control the course of our lives”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative

“The greatest illusion of modern society is that freedom is purely individualistic, when in reality, our freedom is deeply interconnected with the well-being of everyone.”
― Joe Martino

“We're being gaslit to believe the loss of trust in institutions is a result of 'fake news,' while government and mainstream media don't want to take responsibility for their part in lying to and deceiving the public for decades.”
― Joe Martino

“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative

“Cliché is, in a sense, the purest art of intelligibility; it tempts us with the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas, of obscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appearance of necessity.”
― Leo Bersani