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It was not the decree of a king or a sultan or emperor or czar, or something enacted by a far-distant parliament. It was a declaration of political faith and brave intent freely arrived at by an American congress. And that was something
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“Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time?”
― A Brief History of Time
― A Brief History of Time
“Dignity is your value, Jack. It’s something you and every living person have just because you are.” “Is that all?” I ask. “Isn’t that enough?” I’m quiet. “That’s plenty,” Dad tells me. “In fact, it’s everything. The dignity of others is how we know some actions are good and others bad. It’s how you know it isn’t right to steal, or to kill without grave reckoning, or to lie.” “You get all that from dignity?” “You do.”
― Last Summer Boys
― Last Summer Boys
“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.”
― Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
― Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
― The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
Philip’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Philip’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,845 books
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62 friends
977 books
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48 friends
301 books
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71 friends
269 books
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56 friends
114 books
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102 friends
58 books
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165 friends
294 books
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149 friends
371 books
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43 friends
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