aberamentho

“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Human life, for Nietzsche, is ultimately a part of a kind of vast game…[which] is, so to speak, the only game in town….The nature of the game, he holds, establishes a standard for the evaluation of everything falling within its compass. The availability of this standard places evaluation on footing that is as firm as that on which the comprehension of life and the world stands.”
― Richard Schacht

“I wished for the hundredth time I had a better brain.”
― Torquemada, Cain's Jawbone

“The moral to be drawn here is that methods by themselves cannot ensure that scientific practices are being followed. There have to be in addition appropriate psychological attitudes possessed by those who use the methods.”
― Ilkka Niiniluoto, Handbook of Epistemology