Andrew > Recent Status Updates

The constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds.

We're all so eager, both in life and art, to get past this bullshit to the next Good Part up ahead. Believe it or not, Sterne's telling us, this bullshit IS the good part.

Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.

"Knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him"

"Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garyon said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth."

The difference between vulnerability and weakness is that being vulnerable means to be open to attack and weakness is the inability to withstand attack.

Trust and vulnerability are intertwined both being required for the genesis of the other. (chicken/egg). Trust is gained and lost though small easy to overlook moments where we make choices to invest ourselves or not.

Thinkers must learn to master the power of institutions for their ideas to have any chance of achieving a persuasive influence on the world.

By contrast with religion, atheism is prone to seem coldly impatient with our neediness.

An invented world can be as "real" as the familiar world of natural forms, and it is possible to formulate its physical laws, describe its physiology and relate its history. This is neither impossible nor improbable; our age is more interested in the creation of possible worlds than in stale repetition of a world already too well known.

Every form of art is a manifestation of inner life. The beautiful is a product of inner necessity.

We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.

A lack of freedom is no longer, in most developed countries, the problem. Our downfall lies in our inability to make the most of the freedom our ancestors painfully secured over three centuries. ... We face temptations which we revile in those interludes when we can attain sufficient distance from them, but which we lack any encouragement to resist, much to our eventual self disgust and disappointment.

The picture is an addition to the cosmos, and offers the spectator a means of entering into the cosmic totality through his understanding of this new entity.

Struggling with this one. The language is difficult to decode and understand what's going on in the grand scheme. Smorgasbord of irish-english, french, latin and what I think is psuedo-latin. Dictionary not helping. There are however some lovely passages. Such as: http://blog.mezzomind.com/post/328597...

Just finished book 1/3. Awesome so far.

Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of the larger whole.

How will she know that what she has found in her search is true? Again, if she finds what is true--at least what she thinks is true--that depends on her conditioning, on her knowledge, on her past experiences; search then merely becomes a further projection of her own past hopes, fears, and longings.

When you want experience in the religious field, you want it because you have not solved your problems, your daily anxieties, despairs, fears, and sorrows, therefore you want something more. In that demand for more lies deception.

To be related(relationship) means not to be dependent on each other, not to escape from your loneliness through another, not to try and find comfort, companionship, through another. When you seek comfort through another, are dependent, and all the rest of it, can there be any kind of relationship? Or are you then using each other?

Thought is the past. Thought gives vitality to an incident that is over. So thought sustains and gives nourishment to pleasure as well as fear.

Ha, I've had this exact conversation in my head many times. The basic gist of Catch 22, the definition of Catch 22 itself, is the paradox, the Catch 22, that if you think you are crazy then you can't possibly be crazy because crazy people are too crazy to think they are crazy...