Benjamin Pauwels

“Folk wisdom has it that five Jews wrote the rules of society: Moses said, “The law is everything.” Jesus said, “Love is everything.” Marx said, “Money is everything.” Freud said, “Sex is everything.” Einstein said, “Everything is relative.”
― Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947

“Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“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

“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air