“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
― Beyond Good and Evil
― Beyond Good and Evil
“A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.”
― The Slippery Slope
― The Slippery Slope
“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
― The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
― The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don't.”
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“We think of color as a fundamental quality of the world around us. But in the outside world, color doesn’t actually exist. When electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. We can distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths – but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color. Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally.”
― The Brain: The Story of You
― The Brain: The Story of You
Ben’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ben’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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