Shubham Bansal

“thousands of lungs will swell as one across the way, thousands of livers will be soaked with beer, thousands of kidneys will, simultaneously, filter bodily substances, and thousands of hearts will pump blood, and suddenly she is struck by the fragmentation of the world, by the absolute discontinuity of reality in this small area, by the thought of humanity being sprayed in an infinite divergence of trajectories—”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“They used to stay up late, talking into the night while the house was asleep, and maybe they would even whisper I love you, not really knowing what it was they were saying, only that they were saying it to each other”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air