144 ratings (3.11 avg)
1 review

Roderic Day

Add friend

https://www.goodreads.com/rodericday

Roderic’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (13)
currently-reading‎ (0)

read‎ (145)
dinner-table-talk‎ (9)

insightful‎ (7)
wish-fulfillment‎ (2)

skill‎ (1)

Stats | More…

“With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.”
― John C Dolan

tags: lord-byron

0 likes

“Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

tags: ludwig-wittgenstein, metaphilosophy, philosophy, science, the-blue-book, wittgenstein

28 likes

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

tags: 227, literature, reading, writing

114 likes