Amaranta

“Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceits does so because he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent to winning.
Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“… one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing (Schauen) and understanding. This motive can be compared with the longing that irresistibly pulls the town-dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent, high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and traces the calm contours that seem to be made for eternity.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..”
― John le Carré