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“The greatest injustices are committed out of excess, then, not because of necessary things—no one becomes a tyrant in order to get out of the cold” (68-69)

"You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it it a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!" (403)

“He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave them sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity“ (148)

On assessing the truth of propositions: “the objects we suppose our sentences to be about are nothing but the shadows of certain parts of speech, and shadows we do not need in explaining truth. Truth itself is not a relation between a statement and something the statement is about” (45-46).

“About Socrates no conventional literary work can be written, for Socrates does not treat the events around him as worthy of much regard. The only ‘plot’ in which he takes an interest is the unfolding of the argument” (64)

The unity of reason is the unity of a system, and this systematic unity does not serve reason objectively as a principle, extending it over objects, but subjectively as a maxim, in order to extend it over all possible empirical cognitions of objects (610)

“Every beginning is in time, and every boundary of the extended is in space. Space and time, however, are only in the world of sense. Hence appearances are in the world only conditionally, the world itself is neither conditioned nor bounded in an unconditioned way” (527)

“Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world” (160)

“If, therefore we say: The senses represent objects to us as they appear, but the understanding as they are, then the latter is not going to be taken in a transcendental but in a merely empirical way, signifying, namely, how they must be represented as objects of experience […]” (364)

“the categories [i.e., of analytic judgement] do not afford us cognition of things by means of intuition except through their possible application to empirical intuition, i.e., they serve only for the possibility of empirical cognition. This, however, is called experience” (255). An elegant argument that escapes the difficulties Locke and Hume faced in deriving understanding from experience.

“all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance” (185)

"we have immeasurably more reason to congratulate ourselves than to complain of our lot, since for most of our hardships we have only ourselves to blame. It would be especially wrong to complain of the deficiencies in our knowledge, when we make so little use of the knowledge which kindly nature does give to us" (388)

Settembrini: “I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism” (249).

“And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he might have expected, but what is hardly permitted a man to see, and what he never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave” (218)

“Nature the Architect did very well, it seems to me , making men so sensitive to things which have so little effect on the senses. If we were incapable of becoming ambitious or miserly, it would be hard for us [..] to become virtuous and rational enough to work towards our own perfection in the face of the present pleasures which distract us from it” (205)

Matter without unique qualities but continua of the same qualities" ... all bodies have a degree of cohesion; just as I think that there are none which are entirely without fluidity or possessed of a cohesion which cannot be overcome; so that in my view the atoms of Epicurus, which are supposed to be unconquerably hard, cannot exist, any more than can the rarefied and perfectly fluid matter of the Cartesians (125)"

Such rich characters that say so much with their actions.

“I have traced the fundamental elements of epagogics and epigenetics and explained how not only protomory but above all heteromory is the condition of mankind at present, and its course a fatal course: dysexelixis contra diexelixis” (130).

“a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as easily as a radical stir in her own” (293).

“He was a young workman in a white blouse, and with some dust in the creases of his clothes; and in passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through him as though a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.” (91)

“Great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit; a poet may make a great embodiment of a myth, but it is the mass of humanity that knows the myth to be a spiritual truth, and that is why they cherish his poem” (147)

“Understanding and experience are not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experience the fire” (84)

when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry, the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit

In likening (not equating!) scientific with religious experience: “What, in the end are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?” (122). That’s some radical empiricism for you! But strangely compelling and convincing.

“Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God [… these things] are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content […] and as words ‘soul,’ ‘God,’ ‘immortality’ cover no distinctive sense-content [… they are] devoid of any significance. Yet they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God” (55)

“The artist tries to impart the character of the general from the particular things that he must now employ as the embodiment of his plastic notions. He must enlarge the implications of his impression in the work of appearance. He must enlarge them until they enter the relevance of the human world of sensuality” (34)

“But I have made my pilgrimage to my mother’s cottage. It was as meaningless as I knew it would be. The cultural vitamin deficiency is not appeased by nibbling the clay and plaster of the old home. The cultural amputee is still trying to scratch the itch in the missing limb.” (123)

I’m growing convinced of the basic point that (some) mathematics is developed according to conceptual models that have metaphoric expression and that changes in metaphoric expression can precede and drive changes in mathematical practice. I’m getting a little itchy for some implications at this point.

The book’s purpose is a bit muddled so far. I’m not yet convinced that math is metaphorically grounded in embodied experience. At best the authors have shown that bodily experience coherently overlaps math, but in a way that accounts more for rational numbers and arithmetic. Even there causal directionality is hard to show. Does math derive from embodied experience or does embodied sense derive from math?