Benjamin Pauwels

“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

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Journalists sometimes speculate about “brain transplants” when they really should be calling them “body transplants,” because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature