Kareem Gamal

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“أكيد هناك أخطاء قاتلة ارتكبتها لكنّي لا أذكر معظمها (هذه مزية تفاعل الهروب الشهير الذي يجعلنا ننسى). الخطأ الأول الذي أذكره هو كم الرومانسية الفظيع الذي يدفع المرء لتركيبه على أية فتاة تصلح دون اقتناع حقيقي. الخطأ الثاني هو أنني انعزلت وقرأت أكثر من اللازم، بينما كان زملائي يمارسون الحياة ولا يقرؤون عنها. ربما كنت بحاجة إلى جرعة إنفلات أقوى، لكنّي كنت أشعر بأنني سأغير العالم ولم يكن عندي وقت لهراء الآخرين. اليوم أجد أنهم لم يكونوا بهذه الحماقة.”
― أحمد خالد توفيق

“Our imaginations are forlornly under-equipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar. We try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball, in orbit around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons. That isn’t what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls. They are not like anything we recognize. It isn’t clear that ‘like’ even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality’s further horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter – as we are evolved to think – ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large. At the end of a famous essay on ‘Possible Worlds’, the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.’ By the way, I am intrigued by the suggestion that the famous Hamlet speech invoked by Haldane is conventionally mis-spoken. The normal stress is on ‘your’:”
― Anonymous

“So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World