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Symone M.
https://www.goodreads.com/symonemataya
“The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted.”
― Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Library of Ideas
― Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Library of Ideas
“But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
― The End of History and the Last Man
― The End of History and the Last Man
“Thus death is only an illusion, a veil, masking betimes the continuity of life.”
― The Temptation of St. Antony
― The Temptation of St. Antony
“Nansen was asked by Joshu, ‘What is the Way?’ He replied, ‘Your everyday mind is the Way [Heijoshin kore do].”
― The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi
― The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi
“David Levin, ‘prefers the distance of vision … even when it means dehumanisation’.149 But in this he was pursuing the belief that acknowledging our relationship with the world will make it obtrude. In reality it obtrudes more when not acknowledged. The baggage gets on board, as Dennett puts it, without being inspected. In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.150”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Symone’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Symone’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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