A reading notebook

"Tempo al tempo." - "All in good time."

Traditional · Italian saying

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

Albert Einstein · Unspecified

"Science, we say at once, deals with conceptions drawn ultimately from sense-impressions, and its legitimate field is the whole content of the human mind."

Karl Pearson · The Grammar of Science

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Unspecified

"Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of trush then inquire..."

Friedrich Nietzsche · Unspecified

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · Unspecified

"A fanatic is a person who, upon losing sight of his goal, redoubles his efforts."

George Santayana · Regenesis (quotation collected from this book; original speaker unverified)

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. just one thing : that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd."

Albert Camus · The Myth of Sisyphus

"They never came to Madagascar, never to Australia. Neither did Neanderthals. It's only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop."

Svante Pääbo · Unspecified interview

"Never start a fight... but always finish it."

J. Michael Straczynski · Changeling (film)

"I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars... And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street... Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper... And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird... And Janie... And Janie... And... Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday."

Alan Ball · American Beauty (film)

The bad news is time flies. The good news - you are the pilot !

Unknown · No attribution recorded

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."

Henry Ford · Unspecified

"People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you may win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People who really want help may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway. Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway."

Kent M. Keith · Do It Anyway

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Sidney Howard · Gone with the Wind

"... bag of genetic party favors you call a family."

Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman · Family Guy, “Love Thy Trophy” (as-broadcast script, March 14, 2000)

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

Linus Pauling · Unspecified

On this Goethe remarked: [5] "The idea of the distinction between classical and romantic poetry [Dichtung ], which is now spread over the whole world, and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from Schiller and myself. I laid down the maxim of objective treatment of poetry, and would allow no other; but Schiller, who worked quite in the subjective way, deemed his own fashion the right one, and to defend himself against me, wrote the treatise upon 'Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.' He proved to me that I myself, against my will, was romantic, and that my 'Iphigenia,' through the predominance of sentiment, was by no means so classical and so much in the antique spirit as some people supposed. "The Schlegels took up this idea, and carried it further, so that it has now been diffused over the whole world; and every one talks about classicism and romanticism—of [6] which nobody thought fifty years ago."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Conversations with Eckermann (1823–1832), M. Walter Dunne (1901)

You ask if you shall send me books. My dear friend, I beseech you, for the love of God, relieve me from such a yoke! I need no more to be guided, agitated, heated. My heart ferments sufficiently of itself. I want strains to lull me, and I find them to perfection in my Homer. Often do I strive to allay the burning fever of my blood; and you have never witnessed anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as my heart. But need I confess this to you, my dear friend, who have so often endured the anguish of witnessing my sudden transitions from sorrow to immoderate joy, and from sweet melancholy to violent passions? I treat my poor heart like a sick child, and gratify its every fancy. Do not mention this again: there are people who would censure me for it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · The Sorrows of Young Werther

This confirmed me in my resolution of adhering, for the future, entirely to nature. She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters. Much may be alleged in favour of rules, as much may be likewise advanced in favour of the laws of society: an artist formed upon them will never produce anything absolutely bad or disgusting; as a man who observes the laws, and obeys decorum, can never be an absolutely intolerable neighbour, nor a decided villain: but yet, say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression. Do not tell me "that this is too hard, that they only restrain and prune superfluous branches, etc." My good friend, I will illustrate this by an analogy. These things resemble love. A warmhearted youth becomes strongly attached to a maiden: he spends every hour of the day in her company, wears out his health, and lavishes his fortune, to afford continual proof that he is wholly devoted to her. Then comes a man of the world, a man of place and respectability, and addresses him thus: "My good young friend, love is natural; but you must love within bounds. Divide your time: devote a portion to business, and give the hours of recreation to your mistress. Calculate your fortune; and out of the superfluity you may make her a present, only not too often,—on her birthday, and such occasions." Pursuing this advice, he may become a useful member of society, and I should advise every prince to give him an appointment; but it is all up with his love, and with his genius if he be an artist. O my friend! why is it that the torrent of genius so seldom bursts forth, so seldom rolls in fullflowing stream, overwhelming your astounded soul? Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · The Sorrows of Young Werther

Many of the nineteenth and twentieth century figures recognized unquestionably as “great” – Nietzsche, Darwin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung, Piaget – were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty. Their “psychopathology” – a term ridiculous in this context – was generated as a consequence of the revolutionary nature of their personal experience (their action, fantasy and thought). It is no great leap of comparative psychology to see their role in our society as analogous to that of the archaic religious leader and healer.

Jordan B. Peterson · Maps of Meaning

The future shaman is in fact tormented by the incomplete or self-contradictory state of his cultural structure, as it is intrapsychically represented; is undergoing a breakdown induced by some aspect of personal experience, some existential anomaly, that cannot be easily integrated into that structure. This breakdown re-exposes him to the unknown – previously covered, so to speak, by his culture. His comportment during the period of incubation preceding his emergence as shaman is generally marked by commission of acts considered characteristic, in modern and archaic culture alike, of serious mental breakdown. He behaves idiosyncratically, seeking solitude, flying into fits of rage, losing consciousness, living in the mountains or woods alone, and suffering from visions and periods of absent-mindedness.

Jordan B. Peterson · Maps of Meaning

“And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go—then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you. And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings. Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are acending… Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending… With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief. For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going to be. And you also have to work out—what is gladness and what is grief. And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.” ―

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · The Gulag Archipelago

“Truth may be vital, but without love it is unbearable”

Anthony McCarten · The Two Popes (film)

“The psyche not being a unity but a contradictory multiplicity of complexes, tdissociation required for our dialectics with the anima is not so terribly difficult. The art of it consists only in allowing our invisible partner to make herself heard, in putting the mechanism of expression momentarily at her disposal, without being overcome by the distaste one naturally feels at playing such an apparently ludicrous game with oneself, or by doubts as to the genuineness of the voice of one’s interlocutor. This latter point is technically very important: we are so in the habit of identifying ourselves with the thoughts that come to us that we invariably assume we have made them. Curiously enough, it is precisely the most impossible thoughts for which we feel the greatest subjective responsibility. If we were more conscious of the inflexible universal laws that govern even the wildest and most wanton fantasy, we might perhaps be in a better position to see these thoughts above all others as objective occurrences, just as we see dreams, which nobody supposes to be deliberate or arbitrary inventions. It certainly requires the greatest objectivity and absence of prejudice to give the “other side” the opportunity for perceptible psychic activity.”

Carl G. Jung · Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

I can imagine someone using this technique out of a kind of holy inquisitiveness, some youth, perhaps, who would like to set wings to his feet, not because of lameness, but because he yearns for the sun. But a grown man, with too many illusions dissipated, will submit to this inner humiliation and surrender only if forced, for why should he let the terrors of childhood again have their way with him? It is no light matter to stand between a day-world of exploded ideals and discredited values, and a night-world of apparently senseless fantasy. The weirdness of this standpoint is in fact so great that there is probably nobody who does not reach out for security, even though it be a reaching back to the mother who shielded his childhood from the terrors of night. Whoever is afraid must needs be dependent; a weak thing needs support. That is why the primitive mind, from deep psychological necessity, begot religious instruction and embodied it in magician and priest. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is still a valid truth today—for those who can go back to it. For the few who cannot, there is only dependence upon a human being, a humbler and a prouder dependence, a weaker and a stronger support, so it seems to me, than any other. What can one say of the Protestant? He has neither church nor priest, but only God—and even God becomes doubtful.

Carl G. Jung · Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Let that man die unconsoled who can deride the invalid for undertaking a journey to distant, healthful springs, where he often finds only a heavier disease and a more painful death, or who can exult over the despairing mind of a sinner, who, to obtain peace of conscience and an alleviation of misery, makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. Each laborious step which galls his wounded feet in rough and untrodden paths pours a drop of balm into his troubled soul, and the journey of many a weary day brings a nightly relief to his anguished heart. Will you dare call this enthusiasm, ye crowd of pompous declaimers? Enthusiasm! O God! thou seest my tears. Thou hast allotted us our portion of misery: must we also have brethren to persecute us, to deprive us of our consolation, of our trust in thee, and in thy love and mercy? For our trust in the virtue of the healing root, or in the strength of the vine, what is it else than a belief in thee from whom all that surrounds us derives its healing and restoring powers? Father, whom I know not,—who wert once wont to fill my soul, but who now hidest thy face from me,—call me back to thee; be silent no longer; thy silence shall not delay a soul which thirsts after thee. What man, what father, could be angry with a son for returning to him suddenly, for falling on his neck, and exclaiming, "I am here again, my father! forgive me if I have anticipated my journey, and returned before the appointed time! The world is everywhere the same,—a scene of labour and pain, of pleasure and reward; but what does it all avail? I am happy only where thou art, and in thy presence am I content to suffer or enjoy." And wouldst thou, heavenly Father, banish such a child from thy presence?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · The Sorrows of Young Werther

"Human reason, therefore, is nothing other than ex ression of man's adaptedness to the average run of events, which have ke ex ression of man's adaptedness to the average run of events, which have gradua% ex ression of man's adaptedness to the average of events, which have run y become de sited in solidly organized complexes of ideas that consti our objective vaces. Thus the laws of reason those laws which eharac tub are terize and regulate the average 'correct' or adapted attitude." So it is understand able that the rational functions are historically late products. Adaptation to average events and the formation of solidly organized complexes of ideas are the "work of human history," and into their organization has gone the 'Ipbor of countless generations."

Carl G. Jung · Psychological Types

The conscious system is not just a central switchboard for establishing relations between inside and outside; it is at the same time an expression of the organism's creative urge for innovation. But whereas in the biological and animal realm this urge has to operate with infinities of time, in human consciousness it has evolved a timesaving organ by means of which innovations can be tested in far shorter periods. Human culture is a product of this creative urge for experimentation. In view of the shortness of human culture nothing final can yet be said about its success. But the fact remains that in the course of this-compared with biological evolution-tiny span of time during which human consciousness has shaped human culture, the most extraordinary changes have taken place. Technology and science, the tools of consciousness, have created a wealth of artificial organs, and the rapid growth and variety of creative inventions are proof of their superiority when compared with the slow formation and development of organs in biology. Life's experiment in enlisting the aid of consciousness for its creative work would seem to have been a lucky fluke. In making these remarks we are fully aware of our anthropomorphic and teleological manner of speaking. But the very fact that consciousness necessarily experiences itself as the exponent of the creative experiments of the whole as soon as it begins to examine itself and its history gives new weight and new justification to our anthropocentric outlook. It is after all scientifically justifiable to regard consciousness as one of life's experimental organs, more justifiable at any rate than to gloss over the fundamental fact of man's spiritual existence and explain it away with reflexes or behaviorism. By postulating a creative principle at the beginning of his creation myths and placing these at the beginning of the world, man experienced his own-and by projection, God's-creativeness long before the idea of creative evolution was discovered.

Erich Neumann · The Origins and History of Consciousness

"Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."

J. B. S. Haldane · Unspecified

This attempt was made by Otto Gross, who in 1902 published a theoretical study entitled Die zerebrale Sekundärfunktion. It was the basic hypothesis of this work that led him to the conception of two psychological types.1 Although the empirical material discussed by him is taken from the domain of psychopathic inferiority, there is no reason why the insights gained should not be carried over into the wider field of normal psychology. The unbalanced psychic state gives the investigator an almost exaggeratedly clear view of certain psychic phenomena which, very often, can only be dimly perceived within the limits of the normal. The abnormal state sometimes acts like a magnifying glass. Gross himself, in his final chapter, also extends his conclusions to a wider domain, as we shall see. [463] By the “secondary function” Gross understands a cerebral cell-process that comes into action after the “primary function” has taken place. The primary function would correspond to the actual performance of the cell, namely, the production of a positive psychic process, for example an idea. This performance is an energic process, presumably a discharge of chemical tension; in other words, it is a process of chemical decomposition. After this acute discharge, which Gross calls the primary function, the secondary function comes into action. It is a process of recovery, a rebuilding through assimilation. This function will require for its operation a longer or shorter period depending on the intensity of the preceding discharge of energy. During this time the condition of the cell has altered; it is now in a state of stimulation, and this cannot remain without influence on the subsequent psychic processes. Processes that are especially highly-toned and charged with affect require an especially intense discharge of energy, and hence an especially prolonged period of recovery governed by the secondary function. The effect of the secondary function on the psychic process in general consists, according to Gross, in its specific and demonstrable influence on the subsequent course of association, in the sense that it restricts the choice of associations to the “theme” or “leading idea” represented by the primary function. And indeed, in my own experimental work (which was corroborated by several of my pupils), I was able to demonstrate statistically that perseveration followed in the train of ideas with a high feeling-tone.2 My pupil Eberschweiler, in an investigation of language components,3 has demonstrated this same phenomenon in assonances and agglutinations. Further, we know from experiences in pathology how frequently perseverations occur in the case of severe cerebral lesions, apoplexies, tumours, atrophic and other degenerative states. Such perseverations may well be ascribed to this retarded process of recovery. Gross’ hypothesis thus has much to recommend it. It is therefore only natural to ask whether there may not beindividuals, or even types, in whom the period of recovery, the secondary function, lasts longer than in others, and if so, whether certain characteristic psychologies may not be traceable to this. A short secondary function, clearly, will influence far fewer consecutive associations in a given period of time than a long one. Hence the primary function can operate much more frequently. The psychological picture in such a case would show a constant and rapidly renewed readiness for action and reaction, a kind of distractibility, a tendency to superficial associations and a lack of deeper, more concise ones, and a certain incoherence so far as an association is expected to be significant. On the other hand many new themes will crowd up in a given unit of time, though not at all intense or clearly focussed, so that heterogeneous ideas of varying value appear on the same niveau, thus giving the impression of a “levelling of ideas” (Wernicke). This rapid succession of primary functions necessarily precludes any real experience of the affective value of the ideas per se,

Carl G. Jung · Psychological Types

"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I'm looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? -- See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it. “

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? -- See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“His letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing, indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul, Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there. “But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

McAllister: Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams and I'll show you a happy man. John Keating: But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus and always thus will be. McAllister: Tennyson? John Keating: No, Keating.

Tom Schulman · Dead Poets Society (1989 film)

If anyone else had asked, What is Quality? it would have been just another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality. As these waves of thought expanded for him I'm sure he fully expected each wave to reach some shore of existing patterns of thought so that he had a kind of unified relationship with these thought structures. But the shore was never reached until the end, if it appeared at all. For him there was nothing but ever expanding waves of crystallization. I'll now try to follow these waves of crystallization, the second phase of his exploration into quality, as best I can.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a “hollow-flexible” attitude of “beginner's mind.” You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Get up early (five o’clock), go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Eat little and avoid sweets

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Try to do everything by yourself

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year, a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Keep away from women

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Kill desire by work

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Be good, but try to let no one know it

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Always live less expensively than you might

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

Leo Tolstoy · Unidentified Tolstoy biography; photograph embedded in notebook

The answer, of course, is no, you still haven't got anything licked. You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. But if you're a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren't going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I'm trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right. The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Good night then. I will wake you in the morning.” “You’re my alarm clock,” the boy said. “Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?” “I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.” “I can remember it,” the old man said. “I’ll waken you in time.” “I do not like for him to waken me. It is as though I were inferior.”

Ernest Hemingway · The Old Man and the Sea

Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Fair is foul, and foul is fair Hover through the fog and filthy air.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth

Banquo: … And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s In deepest consequence.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth

In his lostness-within and without-the victim of the active pole of the Shadow Lover is eternally restless. This is the man who is always searching for something. He doesn't know what it is he's looking for. but he's the cowboy at the end of the movie riding off alone into the sunset seeking some other excitement, some other adventure. unable to settle down. He has an insatiable hunger to experience some vague something that is just over the next hill. He is compelled to extend the frontiers not of knowledge (for that would be liberating for him) but of his sensuality, no matter what the cost to the mortal man who badly needs. as all mortal men do, merely human happiness. This is James Bond and Indiana Jones. loving and leaving to love again, and leave again.

Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette · King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

I wonder why he jumped, the old man thought. He jumped almost as though to show me how big he was. I know now, anyway, he thought. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.

Ernest Hemingway · The Old Man and the Sea

Phædrus is silent and tries to work out an answer. Everyone is waiting. His thoughts move up to lightning speed, winnowing through the dialectic, playing one argumentative chess opening after another, seeing that each one loses, and moving to the next one, faster and faster...but all the class witnesses is silence. Finally, in embarrassment, the Professor drops the question and begins the lecture. But Phædrus doesn't hear the lecture. His mind races on and on, through the permutations of the dialectic, on and on, hitting things, finding new branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger at each new discovery of the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this “art” called dialectic. The Professor, looking at his expression, becomes quite alarmed, and continues the lecture in a kind of panic. Phædrus' mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try to understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic...the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it. Evil. The Professor calls the lecture to an early end and leaves the room hurriedly.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The man under the influence of the Lover does not want to stop at socially created boundaries. He stands against the artificiality of such things. His life is often unconventional and "messy"-the artist's stu· dio. the creative scholar's study. the "go for it" boss's desk. Consequently, because he is opposed to "law." in this broad sense. we see enacted in his life of confrontation with the conventional the old tension between sensuality and morality, between love and duty. between, as Joseph Campbell poetically describes it. "amor and Rom a"-" am or" standing for passionate experience and "Roma" standing for duty and responsibility to law and order. The Lover energy is rhus utterly opposed-at least at first

Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette · King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

The nature of the process of “identification with the hero” can be understood in most detail as a consequence of the analysis of alchemy, which Jung made his life’s work. Alchemy – considered most generally as the precursor of modern chemistry – was in fact a twenty-centuries’-long endeavour to understand the “transformations of matter.” The alchemical matter, however, was not the matter of modern science – logically enough, as the ancient alchemists practiced in the absence of the presumptions and tools of modern science. It was a substance more like Tao – to “that which produced or constituted the flux of being”; something more like “information” in the modern sense (if information may be considered “latent” in unexplored places); something more like the “unknown” as such (something like the “matrix” of being). Investigation of this instrinsically compelling “matter” – this unknown – produced a series of internal transformations in the alchemical psyche, making it ever-more akin to the Philosopher’s stone: making it something that could turn “base matter” into spiritual gold – making it something that had, in addition, the eternal, durable, and indestructible nature of stone. As the alchemical endeavour progressed, through the Christian era, the “stone” became increasingly assimilated to Christ – the cornerstone “rejected by the builders,” the agent of voluntary transformation – whose actions eternally transform the “fallen world” into paradise. The late-stage alchemists “posited” that a personality that had completely assimilated the “spirit of the unknown” was equivalent to Christ. Jung translated their image-laden mythological language into something more comprehensible – but not yet understood. The terrible central message of this mode of thought is this: do not lie, particularly to yourself, or you will undermine the process that gives you the strength to bear the tragic world. In your weakness – the consequence of your lie – you will become cruel, arrogant and vengeful. You will then serve as an “unconscious” emissary of the agent of destruction, and work to bring about the end of time. The “third mode” of adaptation – alternative to decadence and fascism – is heroic. Heroism is comparatively rare, because it requires voluntary sacrifice of group-fostered certainty, and indefinite acceptance of consequent psychological chaos, attendant upon (re)exposure to the unknown. This is nonetheless the creative path, leading to new discovery or reconfiguration, comprising the living element of culture. The creative actor adopts the role of hero, and places himself beyond (even in opposition to) the protective enclave of history. In consequence, he suffers re-exposure to the terrible unknown. Such re exposure engenders mortal terror, but allows for union with possibility – allows for inspiration, reconstruction, and advancement. It is the disintegration and disinhibition of meaning (preceding its reintegration) – occurrences necessarily attendant upon the heroic process – that produces the phenomena endlessly linking genius, in the popular imagination, with insanity. The genius and the lunatic are separated, however, by their relative position with regards to the unknown: the genius is the fortunate hero who faces the unexpected consequences of his insufficiently adaptive behavior voluntarily, on ground that he has chosen. The unfortunate madman, by constrast, has run away from something carnivorous, something that thrives on neglect and grows larger – has run away from something that will finally devour him. The genius dissolves, is flooded with indeterminate meaning, and is then reconstituted – then dissolves, floods and reconfigures the social world. The psychotic dissolves, and drowns in the flood. It is capacity to voluntarily face the unknown, and to reconfigure accordingly the propositions that guided past adaptation, that constitutes the eternal spirit of man, the world-creating Word. The existence and nature of that spirit has been granted due recognition in in Western (and Eastern) philosophy and religion since time immemorial. The eminent theologist Reinhold Niebuhr states: “In both Plato and Aristotle ‘mind’ is sharply distinguished from the body. It is the unifying and ordering principle, the organ of logos, which brings harmony into the life of the soul, as logos is the creative and forming principle of the world. Greek metaphysical presuppositions are naturally determinative for the doctrine of man; and since Parmenides Greek philosophy had assumed an identity between being and reason on the one hand and on the other presupposed that reason works upon some formless or unformed stuff which is never completely tractable. In the thought of Aristotle matter is ‘a remnant, the non-existent in itself unknowable and alien to reason, that remains after the process of clarifying the thing into form and conception. This non-existent neither is nor is not; it is “not yet,” that is to say it attains reality only insofar as it becomes the vehicle of some conceptual determination.’ 532 ”

Jordan B. Peterson · Maps of Meaning

This space must be sealed from the influence of the outside world, especially, in the case of boys, from the influence of women. Often, the initiates are put through terrifying emotional and excruciatingly painful physical trials. They learn to submit to the pain of life, to the ritual elders, and to the masculine traditions and myths of the society. They are taught all the secret wisdom of men. And they are released from the sacred space only when they have successfully completed the ordeal and been reborn as men.

Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette · King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the “one.” Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the “many.” I myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring to find the Buddha in the quality of the facts around me, but Phædrus was clearly a Platonist by temperament and when the classes shifted to Plato he was greatly relieved. His Quality and Plato's Good were so similar that if it hadn't been for some notes Phædrus left I might have thought they were identical. But he denied it, and in time I came to see how important this denial was.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The first of the Platonic Dialogues assigned is the Gorgias, and Phædrus has a sense of having arrived. This at last is where he wants to be. All along he has had a feeling of being swept forward by forces he doesn't understand...Messianic forces. October has come and gone. Days have become phantasmal and incoherent, except in terms of Quality. Nothing matters except that he has a new and shattering and world-shaking truth about to be born, and like it or not, the world is morally obligated to accept It.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

What was Plato's real purpose in this? Phædrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

If problems are accepted, and dealt with before they arise, they might even be prevented before confusion begins, In this way peace may be maintained. The brittle is easily shattered, and the small is easily scattered. Great trees grow from the smallest shoots; a terraced garden, from a pile of earth, and a journey of a thousand miles begins by taking the initial step. He who contrives, defeats his purpose; and he who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, so does not lose. It is easy to fail when nearing completion, therefore, take care right to the end, not only in the beginning. The sage seeks freedom from desire, not grasping at ideas. He brings men back when they are lost, and helps them find the Tao.

Laozi · Tao Te Ching (unspecified translation)

Let now the savage instincts sleep And all the violence they do; When human love stirs in the deep The love of God is stirring too.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Unspecified

As a doctor who deals with ordinary people, I know that the universities have ceased to act as disseminators of light. People are weary of scientific specialization and rationalism and intellectualism. They want to hear truths that broaden rather than restrict, that do not obscure but enlighten, that do not run off them like water but penetrate them to the marrow. This search is only too likely to lead a large if anonymous public astray.

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.

H. D. F. Kitto · The Greeks, quoted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It is, however, true that much of the evil in the world comes from the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious, as it is also true that with increasing insight we can combat this evil at its source in ourselves, in the same way that science enables us to deal effectively with injuries inflicted from without. [167] The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes. Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 10: Civilization in Transition

The human body completely changes the matter it is made of roughly every 8 weeks, through metabolism, replication and repair. Yet, you're still you --with all your memories, your personality... If science insists on chasing particles, they will follow them right through an organism and miss the organism entirely.

Robert Rosen · As told to Judith Rosen; original source unspecified

Moral qualities are won only in freedom and prove their worth only in morally dangerous situations.

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 10: Civilization in Transition

Macbeth: (aside) The prince of Cumberland! That is a step On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth

Lady Macbeth: Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth

Lady Macbeth: Naught’s had, all’s spent, Where our desire is got without content. 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

William Shakespeare · Macbeth

The Chairman is right. It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses. --

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.“

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?”

Robert M. Pirsig · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Yet things are not quite so simple as that. Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so, whatever the legislation of the future may have to say about it. He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals. This dilemma reveals the vast uncertainty that Eros holds for man. For, at bottom, Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure.

Carl G. Jung · Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Confucius · Unspecified translation

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

G. K. Chesterton · Unspecified

Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is often the law. In society, there are protections for the weak. Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression. My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind. Romanticism always turns into decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster. It is the hammer and the anvil, crushing individuality. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth, air, water, and fire.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Name and person are part of the West’s quest for form. The West insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know; to know is to control. I will demonstrate that the West’s greatness arises from this delusional certitude. Far Eastern culture has never striven against nature in this way. Compliance, not confrontation is its rule. Buddhist meditation seeks the unity and harmony of reality. Twentieth-century physics, going full circle back to Heracleitus, postulates that all matter is in motion. In other words, there is no thing, only energy. But this perception has not been imaginatively absorbed, for it cancels the West’s intellectual and moral assumptions.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Comedy is born of the clash between Apollo and Dionysus. Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Tragedy is a Western vehicle for testing and purification of the male will. The difficulty in grafting female protagonists onto it is a result not of male prejudice but of instinctive sexual strategics. Woman introduces untransformed cruelty into tragedy because she is the problem that the genre is trying to correct.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since she is that cycle. Her sexual maturity means marriage to the moon, waxing and waning in lunar phases. Moon, month, menses: same word, same world. The ancients knew that woman is bound to nature’s calendar, an appointment she cannot refuse. The Greek pattern of free will to hybris to tragedy is a male drama, since woman has never been deluded (until recently) by the mirage of free will. She knows there is no free will, since she is not free. She has no choice but acceptance. Whether she desires motherhood or not, nature yokes her into the brute inflexible rhythm of procreative law. Menstrual cycle is an alarming clock that cannot be stopped until nature wills it.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Even now, it is usually men rather than women who claim logic’s superiority to emotion. This they comically tend to do at moments of maximum emotional chaos, which they may have incited and are helpless to stem.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

What has nature given man to defend himself against woman? Here we come to the source of man’s cultural achievements, which follow so directly from his singular anatomy. Our lives as physical beings give rise to basic metaphors of apprehension, which vary greatly between the sexes. Here there can be no equality. Man is sexually compartmentalized. Genitally, he is condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directedness. He must learn to aim. Without aim, urination and ejaculation end in infantile soiling of self or surroundings. Woman’s eroticism is diffused throughout her body. Her desire for foreplay remains a notorious area of miscommunication between the sexes. Man’s genital concentration is a reduction but also an intensification. He is a victim of unruly ups and downs. Male sexuality is inherently manic-depressive. Estrogen tranquilizes, but androgen agitates. Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and needles of their hormones. In sex as in life they are driven beyond—beyond the self, beyond the body. Even in the womb this rule applies. Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy. The male genital metaphor is concentration and projection. Nature gives concentration to man to help him overcome his fear. Man approaches woman in bursts of spasmodic concentration. This gives him the delusion of temporary control of the archetypal mysteries that brought him forth. It gives him the courage to return. Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women. Women have no problem to solve by sex. Physically and psychologically, they are serenely selfcontained. They may choose to achieve, but they do not need it. They are not thrust into the beyond by their own fractious bodies. But men are out of balance. They must quest, pursue, court, or seize. Pigeons on the grass, alas: in such parkside rituals we may savor the comic pathos of sex. How often one spots a male pigeon making desperate, selfinflating sallies toward the female, as again and again she turns her back on him and nonchalantly marches away. But by concentration and insistence he may carry the day. Nature has blessed him with obliviousness to his own absurdity. His purposiveness is both a gift and a burden. In human beings, sexual concentration is the male’s instrument for gathering together and forcibly fixing the dangerous chthonian superflux of emotion and energy that I identify with woman and nature. In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to nonbeing and back. Through concentration to projection into the beyond. The male projection of erection and ejaculation is the paradigm for all cultural projection and conceptualization—from art and philosophy to fantasy, hallucination, and obsession. Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. I leave open the question of brain differences.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

This is one genre of self-expression women will never master. A male dog marking every bush on the block is a graffiti artist, leaving his rude signature with each lift of the leg. Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters. There is no projection beyond the boundaries of the self. Space is claimed by being sat on, squatter’s Rights.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

Generally speaking the symbol works in opposite ways for primitive and modem man." Historically, the symbol led to the development of consciousness, to reality-adaptation and the discovery of the objective world. It is now known, for instance, that sacred animals came "before" stockbreeding, just as In general the sacred meaning of a thing is older than its profane meaning. Its objective significance is only perceived afterwards, behind its symbolic significance. For modem man the emergence of symbols on the "wa inward" has a different meaning and function. Here, the mediatory position orthe symbol, which is due to its being a combination of conscious and unconscious elements, is proved by the fact that the Ilnk-back of conscious to unconscious proceeds via the symbol, just as with the dawn man the development went in the reverse direction from unconscious to conscious.

Erich Neumann · The Origins and History of Consciousness

After examining philosophers between the lines with a sharp eye for a sufficient length of time, I tell myself the following: we must consider even the greatest part of conscious thinking among the instinctual activities. Even in the case of philosophical thinking we must relearn here, in the same way we relearned about heredity and what is “innate.” Just as the act of birth merits little consideration in the procedures and processes of heredity, so there’s little point in setting up “consciousness” in any significant sense as something opposite to what is instinctual—the most conscious thinking of a philosopher is led on secretly and forced into particular paths by his instincts. Even behind all logic and its apparent dynamic authority stand evaluations of worth or, putting the matter more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a particular way of life—for example, that what is certain is more valuable than what is uncertain, that appearance is of less value than the “truth.” Evaluations like these could, for all their regulatory importance for us, still be only foreground evaluations, a particular kind of niaiserie [stupidity], necessary for the preservation of beings precisely like us. That’s assuming, of course, that not just man is the “measure of things” . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

The sight of a man saying no with his bare hands is one of the things that most mysteriously and profoundly stir the hearts of men.

André Malraux · Unspecified

Gradually I came to learn what every great philosophy has been up to now, namely, the self-confession of its originator and a form of unintentional and unrecorded memoir, and also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy made up the essential living seed from which on every occasion the entire plant has grown. In fact, when we explain how the most remote metaphysical claims in a philosophy really arose, it’s good (and shrewd) for us always to ask first: What moral is it (is he—) aiming at? Consequently, I don’t believe that a “drive to knowledge” is the father of philosophy but that knowledge (and misunderstanding) have functioned only as a tool for another drive, here as elsewhere. But whoever explores the basic drives of human beings, in order to see in this very place how far they may have carried their game as inspiring geniuses (or demons and goblins), will find that all drives have already practised philosophy at some time or another—and that every single one of them has all too gladly liked to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

In every philosophy there is a point where the “conviction” of the philosopher steps onto the stage, or, to make the point in the language of an old mystery play: The ass arrived Beautiful and most valiant.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

There lives within the very flame of love A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it.

William Shakespeare · Hamlet

I am not what happens to me, rather I chose what I become

Unknown · Quotation whose Jung attribution is explicitly rejected in the notebook

“ The term "self" seemed to me a suitable one for this unconscious substrate, whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself. This realization is of fundamental importance for the psychology of religious phenomena, which is why Ignatius Loyola started off his Spiritual Exercises with "Homo creatus est" as their "fundamentum." But, fundamental as it is, it can be only half the psychological truth. If it were the whole truth it would be tantamount to determinism, for if man were merely a creature that came into being as a result of something already existing unconsciously, he would have no freedom and there would be no point in consciousness. Psychology must reckon with the fact that despite the causal nexus man does enjoy a feeling of freedom, which is identical with autonomy of consciousness. However much the ego can be proved to be dependent and preconditioned, it cannot be convinced that it has no freedom. An absolutely preformed consciousness and a totally dependent ego would be a pointless farce, since everything would proceed just as well or even better unconsciously. The existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and Autonomous.”

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East

What we need, you see, is really systematic training in political science and history. It’s obvious there’s a need for this now. There was, following the Sixties, an appetite for history, but the people in academe were not willing to do the work necessary to master history and anthropology and so on. Instead, it was sort of like, “Hey, we need history! Let’s see. Oh—there’s Foucault!” It was sort of like that. It’s sort of like ducks when they’re born—the first thing they see, you know? So if they see a vacuum cleaner, they think it’s their mother. They’ll follow the vacuum cleaner. That’s what happened. Foucault is the vacuum cleaner that everyone followed.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

What we need, you see, is really systematic training in political science and history. It’s obvious there’s a need for this now. There was, following the Sixties, an appetite for history, but the people in academe were not willing to do the work necessary to master history and anthropology and so on. Instead, it was sort of like, “Hey, we need history! Let’s see. Oh—there’s Foucault!” It was sort of like that. It’s sort of like ducks when they’re born—the first thing they see, you know? So if they see a vacuum cleaner, they think it’s their mother. They’ll follow the vacuum cleaner. That’s what happened. Foucault is the vacuum cleaner that everyone followed.

Camille Paglia · Free Women, Free Men

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

Oscar Wilde · The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

William Shakespeare · As You Like It

Sensuality often makes the growth of love too fast, so that the root remains weak and easy to rip out.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

Allāhına güveneŋ yumruḳ ursa ḳara daġlar yıḫar. Those who trust in God destroy even the black mountains if they punch them.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Üstin ala bedirli ay gelende sıçramaḳa ḥamlelenür. When the light of the full moon appears atop, [the pied violent tiger] makes a move to leap.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Tekebbürlik eyleyeni Taŋrı sevmez. God does not like arrogant people.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Kara saçuŋ dolaşmışını daraġ yazar. The comb is able to detangle entangled black hair.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Eger erdür eger ḫatun bu dünyāda nāmūslı ġayretli ḳoççaḳ gerek. If it is a man or woman, it is necessary to have an honest and zealous heart in this world.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Yapa yapa ḳarlar yaġsa yaza ḳalmaz. If the flaky snow falls, it will not stay in the summer.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Ecel vaʿde ėrmeyince kimse ölmez. If one's dying day doesn't come, that person will not die.

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

Aġlamaġıla nesne mi olur? What can be done by crying?

Traditional · Book of Dede Korkut (Dresden and Gonbad manuscripts; unspecified English translator)

“Only the living presence of the eternal images can lend the human psyche a dignity which makes it morally possible for a man to stand by his own soul, and be convinced that it is worth his while to persevere with it. Only then will he realize that the conflict is in him, that the discord and tribulation are his riches, which should not be squandered by attacking others; and that, if fate should exact a debt from him in the form of guilt, it is a debt to himself. Then he will recognize the worth of his psyche, for nobody can owe a debt to a mere nothing. But when he loses his own values he becomes a hungry robber, the wolf, lion, and other ravening beasts which for the alchemists symbolized the appetites that break loose when the black waters of chaos – i.e., the unconsciousness of projection – have swallowed up the king.”

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis

Just follow the old advice And my cousin the snake. There’ll come a time when your godlikeness Will make you quiver and quake.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Faust

The godlikeness evidently refers to knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. The analysis and conscious realization of unconscious contents engender a certain superior tolerance, thanks to which even relatively indigestible portions of one’s unconscious characterology can be accepted. This tolerance may look very wise and superior, but often it is no more than a grand gesture that brings all sorts of consequences in its train. Two spheres have been brought together which before were kept anxiously apart. After considerable resistances have been overcome, the union of opposites is successfully achieved, at least to all appearances. The deeper understanding thus gained, the juxtaposition of what was before separated, and hence the apparent overcoming of the moral conflict, give rise to a feeling of superiority that may well be expressed by the term “godlikeness.” But this same juxtaposition of good and evil can have a very different effect on a different kind of temperament. Not everyone will feel himself a superman, holding in his hands the scales of good and evil. It may also seem as though he were a helpless object caught between hammer and anvil; not in the least a Hercules at the parting of the ways, but rather a rudderless ship buffeted between Scylla and Charybdis. For without knowing it, he is caught up in perhaps the greatest and most ancient of human conflicts, experiencing the throes of eternal principles in collision. Well might he feel himself like a Prometheus chained to the Caucasus, or as one crucified. This would be a “godlikeness” in suffering. Godlikeness is certainly not a scientific concept, although it aptly characterizes the psychological state in question. Nor do I imagine that every reader will immediately grasp the peculiar state of mind implied by “godlikeness.” The term belongs too exclusively to the sphere of belles-lettres. So I should probably be better advised to give a more circumspect description of this state. The insight and understanding, then, gained by the analysand usually reveal much to him that was before unconscious. He naturally applies this knowledge to his environment; in consequence he sees, or thinks he sees, many things that before were invisible. Since his knowledge was helpful to him, he readily assumes that it would be useful also to others. In this way he is liable to become arrogant; it may be well meant, but it is nonetheless annoying to other people. He feels as though he possesses a key that opens many, perhaps even all, doors. Psychoanalysis itself has this same bland unconsciousness of its limitations, as can clearly be seen from the way it meddles with works of art.

Carl G. Jung · Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

In their young years, people worship and despise still without that art of subtlety which constitutes the greatest gain in life. And it’s reasonable enough that they must atone, with some difficulty, for having bombarded men and things in such a way with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the absolute, will be terribly parodied and misused until people learn to put some art into their feelings and even prefer risking an attempt with artificiality, as the real artists of life do. The anger and reverence typical of the young do not seem to ease up until they have sufficiently distorted men and things so that they can vent themselves on them.—Youth is in itself already something fraudulent and deceptive. Later, when the young soul, tortured by nothing but disappointments, finally turns back against itself suspiciously, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience, how it rages against itself from this point on, how it tears itself apart impatiently, how it takes revenge for its lengthy self-deception, just as if it had been a voluntary blindness! In this transition people punish themselves through their mistrust of their own feeling; they torment their enthusiasm with doubt; indeed, they already feel good conscience as a danger, as a veiling of the self, so to speak, and exhaustion of their finer honesty. Above all, people take sides, basically the side against “the young.” A decade later, they under stand that all this was also still—youth!

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

Moreover, he is no model human being. He does not go ahead of anyone or behind. He places himself in general too far away to have a reason to take sides between good and evil. When people confused him for such a long time with the philosopher, with the Caesar-like breeder and cultural power house, they held him in much too high honour and overlooked the most essential thing about him—he is an instrument, something of a slave, although certainly the most sublime form of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien [almost nothing]! The objective man is an instrument, an expensive, easily damaged and blunted tool for measurement and an artful arrangement of mirrors, something we should take care of and respect. But he is no goal, no way out or upward, no complementary human being in whom the rest of existence is justified, no conclusion—and even less a beginning, a procreation and first cause. He is nothing strong, powerful, self-assured, something which wants to be master. He is much rather merely a delicate, finely blown mobile pot for forms, which must first wait for some content and meaning or other, in order to “give himself a shape” consistent with it—usually a man without form and content, a “selfless” man. And thus also nothing for women, in parenthesi [in parenthesis].

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

… whether it is now that indifference and coldness of a metaphorical statute against the hot-headed foolishness of the emotions, which the Stoics recommended and applied as a cure; or even that no-more-laughing and no-more-crying of Spinoza, his excessively naive support for the destruction of the emotions through analysis and vivisection; or that repression of the emotions to a harmless mean, according to which they should be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morality; even morality as the enjoyment of emotions in a deliberate dilution and spiritualization through artistic symbolism, something like music or the love of God and of man for God’s sake—for in religion the passions have civil rights once more, provided that . . . ; finally even that accommodating and wanton dedication to the emotions, as Hafis and Goethe taught, that daring permission to let go of the reins, that physical-spiritual licentia morum [freedom in behaviour] in the exceptional examples of wise old owls and drunkards, for whom it “has little danger any more.” This also for the chapter “morality as timidity.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

Whether hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaimonianism—all these ways of thinking, which measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to contingent circumstances and secondary issues, are ways of thinking in the foreground and naivete, which everyone who knows about creative forces and an artistic conscience will look down on, not without ridicule and not without pity. Pity for you!—that is, of course, not pity the way you mean the term: that is not pity for social “need,” for “society” and its sick and unlucky people, with those depraved and broken down from the start—they’re lying on the ground all around us—even less is it pity for the grumbling oppressed, the rebellious slave classes, who strive for mastery—they call it “Freedom.” Our pitying is a higher compassion which sees further—we see how man is making himself smaller, how you are making him smaller!—and there are moments when we look at your very pity with an indescribable anxiety, where we defend ourselves against this pity—where we find your seriousness more dangerous than any carelessness. You want, if possible—and there is no more fantastic “if possible”—to do away with suffering. What about us? It does seem that we would prefer it to be even higher and worse than it ever was! Well being, the way you understand it—that is no goal. To us that looks like an end, a condition which immediately makes human beings laughable and contemptible—something which makes their destruction desirable! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—don’t you realize that up to this point it is only this suffering which has created every enhancement in man up to now? That tension of a soul in misery which develops its strength, its trembling when confronted with great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in bearing, holding out against, interpreting, and using unhappiness, and whatever has been conferred upon it by way of profundity, secrecy, masks, spirit, cunning, and greatness—has that not been given to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In human beings, creature and creator are united. In man is material stuff, fragments, excess, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos, but in man there is also creator, artist, hammer hardness, the divinity of the spectator and the seventh day—do you understand this contrast? And do you understand that your pity for the “creature in man” is for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn apart, burned, glow, purified—for what must necessarily suffer and should suffer? And our pity—don’t you understand for whom our reverse pity matters, when it protects itself against your pity as against the most wretched of all mollycoddling and weakness?—And thus pity against pity!— But, to say the point again, there are higher problems than all those of enjoyment, suffering, and pity, and every philosophy that leads only to these is something naive.—

Friedrich Nietzsche · Beyond Good and Evil

Where is what you most want to be found? Where you are least likely to look.

Jordan B. Peterson · Maps of Meaning

“In sterquiliniis invenitur” – in filth it will be found. This is perhaps the prime “alchemical” dictum. What you need most is always to be found where you least wish to look. This is really a matter of definition. The more profound the error, the more difficult the revolution – the more fear and uncertaintly released as a consequence of restructuring. The things that are most informative are also frequently most painful. Under such circumstances, it is easy to run away. The act of running away, however, transforms the ambivalent unknown into that which is too terrifying to face. Acceptance of anomalous information brings terror and possibility, revolution and transformation. Rejection of unbearable fact stifles adaptation, and strangles life. We choose one path or another at every decision point in our lives, and emerge as the sum total of our choices.

Jordan B. Peterson · Maps of Meaning

Something should be clarified here: It is not truly accurate to state that the reality portrayed in children’s fiction is personified. It is the case, instead (and this is a genuine reversal of the presumption in question), that we directly and naturally perceive reality as personified, and then must work very diligently to strip that personification away, so that we can detect “objective reality.” We understand reality, therefore, as if it is constructed of personalities. That is because so much of what we encounter in our hypersocial reality, our complex societies, is in fact personality—and gendered personality, at that, reflecting the billion years or so since the emergence of sexual reproduction (ample time for its existence to have profoundly structured our perceptions). We understand male, and abstract from that the masculine. We understand female, and abstract from that the feminine. Finally, we understand the child, and abstract from that, most commonly, the son. These basic divisions are clearly reflecte in the creation story of the Enuma Elish, just as they are reflected in, or more accurately underpin, our understanding of the stories we all know.

Jordan B. Peterson · Beyond Order

It frequently happens that women who do not really love their husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

Carl G. Jung · Memories, Dreams, Reflections

This is where those perilous aberrations begin, the first of which is the attempt to dominate everything by the intellect. This serves the secret purpose of placing both doctor and patient at a safe distance from the archetypal effect and thus from real experience, and of substituting for psychic reality an apparently secure, artificial, but merely two-dimensional conceptual world in which the reality of life is well covered up by so-called clear concepts. Experience is stripped of its substance, and instead mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place of reality. No one has any obligations to a concept; that is what is so agreeable about conceptuality--it promises protection from experience. The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts. Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile procedure is repeated ad infinitum.

Carl G. Jung · Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself. Otherwise, why would you feel the loss? Otherwise, why would you feel, involuntarily, sorrowful and bereft (and that from a source self-deception cannot reach)? You grieve because something that you valued is no longer in existence. Thus, in the core of your Being, you have decided that the person’s life was valuable, despite whatever trouble they caused you—and themselves. In my experience, that happens even when people die who were quite monstrous. It is a rare person whose life has gone so catastrophically wrong that their death brings no sorrow.

Jordan B. Peterson · Beyond Order

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood

George Orwell · Unspecified (notebook attribution)

Could it be that we communicate in stories (and everyone else understands them) because what everyone is doing in the world is fundamentally a story? Could that mean that the world of experience is, in truth, indistinguishable from a story—that it cannot be represented in a manner more accurate than that of the story? We are, in principle, adapted to the world—adapted to its realities. Thus, if we naturally construe the world as a story, then perhaps the world is most accurately, or at least most practically, construed as a story (and accurate and practical are not so easy to distinguish). You might argue, contrarily, that the scientific view of the world is more accurate, in some sense, and that the scientific view is not fundamentally a story. But, as far as I can tell, it is still nested inside a story: one that goes something like “careful and unbiased pursuit of the truth will make the world a better place for all people, reducing suffering, extending life, and producing wealth.”

Jordan B. Peterson · Beyond Order

Diagnosis does not mean saying someone is pathological; it means “thorough knowledge,” that is to say of your psychological state. “Hypertrophy of intellectual intuition” is a diagnosis I would apply also to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and many others. I myself am one-sided in this respect. One compensates for it with a feeling of inferiority.

Carl G. Jung · Letters, vol. 1, p. 64: letter to Walter Robert Corti, April 30, 1929

The term “thinking” should, in my view, be confined to the linking up of ideas by means of a concept, in other words, to an act of judgment, no matter whether this act is intentional or not. The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition. Further, I call directed thinking a rational function, because it arranges the contents of ideation under concepts in accordance with a rational norm of which I am conscious. Undirected thinking is in my view an irrational function, because it arranges and judges the contents of ideation by norms of which I am not conscious and therefore cannot recognize as being in accord with reason. Subsequently I may be able to recognize that the intuitive act of judgment accorded with reason, although it came about in a way that appears to me irrational.

Carl G. Jung · Collected Works, vol. 6, paragraphs 831–832

The type is nothing static. It changes in the course of life, but I most certainly was characterized by thinking. I always thought, from early childhood on, and I had a great deal of intuition too. And I had a definite difficulty with feeling, and my relation to reality was not particularly brilliant. I was often at variance with the reality of things.

Carl G. Jung · C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, p. 435

I was prepared to spend half the night telling them all about it\ Vith pride, as though all the victories and advances were the \vork of my own hands. But at this point the duty jailer brought in my cot, and I had to set it up without tnaking any noise. I was helped by a young fello\v my own age, also a military man. His tunic and aviator's cap hung on his cot. He had asked me, even before the old man spoke, not for news of the war but for tobacco. But although I felt openhearted to\vard my ne\V friends, and although not many words had been exchanged in the few minutes since I joined them, I sensed something alien in this front-line soldier \Vho was my contemporary, and, as far as he was concerned, I clammed up immediately and forever. (I had not yet even heard the word "nasedka"-"st.ool pigeon"nor learned that there had to be one such "stool pigeon" in each cell. And I had not yet had time to think things over and conclude that I did not like this fellow, Georgi Kramarenko. But a spiritual relay, a sensor relay, had clicked inside me, and it had closed him off from me for good and all. I would not bother to recall this event if it had been the only one of its kind. But soon, \vith astonishment, and alann, I became aware of the \VOrk of this internal sensor relay as a constant, inborn trait. The years passed and I lay on the same bunks, marched in the same formations, and worked in the same work brigades with hundreds of others. And ahvays that secret sensor relay, for whose creation I deserved not the least bit of credit, worked even before I remembered it \vas there, worked at the first sight of a human face and eyes, at the first sound of a voice-so that I opened my heart to that person either fully or just the \Vidth of a crack, or else shut myself off from him completely. This was so consistently unfailing that all the efforts of the State Security officers to employ stool pigeons began to seen1 to me as insignificant as being pestered by gnats: after all, a person who has undertaken to be a traitor always betrays the fact in his face and in his voice, and even though son1e were more skilled in pretense, there was always something fishy about them. On the other hand, the sensor relay helped me distinguish those to whom I could from the very beginning of our acquaintance completely disclose my most precious depths and secrets-secrets for which heads roll. Thus it was that I got through eight years of imprisonment, three years of exile, and another six years of underground authorship, \Vhich were in no wise less dangerous. During all those seventeen years I recklessly revealed myself to dozens of people-and didn't make a misstep even once. (I have never read about this trait anywhere, and I mention it here for those interested in psychology. It seems to nle that such spiritual sensors exist in many of us, but because we live in too technological and rational an age, \Ve neglect this miracle and don't allo\v it to develop.) We set up the cot, and I was then ready

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · The Gulag Archipelago

"Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense."30 [accurate translation: "Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a 'desert plain.' For us, there is a 'passion' in the midst of that expanse. The knower [of God] who reaches there will prostrate [in prayer],/ (For) there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any 'where' (in) that place."] [az kufr-o ze-islâm berûn, SaHrâyê-st mâ-râ ba-meyân-é ân faZâ, sawdâyê-st `ârif chô ba-d-ân rasîd sar-râ be-neh-ad nay kufr-o na islâm, na ân-jâ jâyê-st]

Rumi · Quatrain 395; notebook includes adapted English and Persian transliteration

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

William Plomer · Unspecified

Those of us who saw the film called Resurrection - taken from a book by Tolstoy - years ago, may have had similar thoughts. Here were great destinies and great men. For us, at that time, there was no great fate; there was no chance to achieve such greatness. After the picture we went to the nearest cafe, and over a cup of coffee and a sandwich we forgot the strange metaphysical thoughts which for one moment had crossed our minds. But when we ourselves were confronted with a great destiny and faced with the decision of meeting it with equal spiritual greatness, by then we had forgotten our youthful resolutions of long ago, and we failed. Perhaps there came a day for some of us when we saw the same film again, or a similar one. But by then other pictures may have simultaneously unrolled before one's inner eye; pictures of people who attained much more in their lives than a sentimental film could show. Some details of a particular man's inner greatness may have come to one's mind, like the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.'

Viktor E. Frankl · Man’s Search for Meaning

I remember a personal experience. Almost in tears from pain (I had terrible sores on my feet from wearing torn shoes), I limped a few kilometers with our long column of men from the camp to our work site. Very cold, bitter winds struck us. I kept thinking of the endless little problems of our miserable life. What would there be to eat tonight? If a piece of sausage came as extra ration, should I exchange it for a piece of bread? Should I trade my last cigarette, which was left from a bonus I received a fortnight ago, for a bowl of soup? How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces? Would I get to our work site in time to join my usual working party or would I have to join another, which might have a brutal foreman? What could I do to get on good terms with the Capo, who could help me to obtain work in camp instead of undertaking this horribly long daily march? I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Viktor E. Frankl · Man’s Search for Meaning

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how," could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why - an aim - for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, "I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that? What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. "Life" does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!" (How much suffering there is to get through!) Rilke spoke of "getting through suffering" as others would talk of "getting through work." There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, "I have wept it out of my system."

Viktor E. Frankl · Man’s Search for Meaning

At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Viktor E. Frankl · Man’s Search for Meaning

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up hee revered objecs before you nd perhaps heir nature nd their sequence will give you a law, the undamental law of your on true self. Compre these objects one wih another, see how one completes, expands, supasses, trnsigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep ithin you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Untimely Meditations

THROUGH me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost. Justice incited my sublime Creator; Created me divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. Before me there were no created things, Only eterne, and I eternal last. “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” These words in sombre colour I beheld Written upon the summit of a gate; Whence I: “Their sense is, Master, hard to me!” And he to me, as one experienced: “Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned, All cowardice must needs be here extinct. We to the place have come, where I have told thee Thou shalt behold the people dolorous Who have foregone the good of intellect.” And after he had laid his hand on mine With joyful mien, whence I was comforted, He led me in among the secret things.

Dante Alighieri · Inferno (unspecified translation)

Thus I began: "Poet. you who must guide me, before you trust me to that arduous passage, look to me and look through me-can I be worthy? You sang how the father of Sylvius, while still in corruptible flesh won to that other world, aossing with mortal sense the immortal sill (15) But if the Adversary of all Evil weighing his consequence and who and what should issue from him, treated him so wellthat cannot seem unfitting to thinking men, since he was chosen father of Mother Rome and of her Empire by God's will and token.. Both, to speak strictly, were founded and foreknown as the established Seat of Holiness for the successon of Great Peter's throne. In that quest, which your venes celebrate, he learned those mysteries from which arose his victory and Rome's apostolate. There later came the chosen vessel, Paul, bearing the confirmation of that Faith which is the one true door to life eternaL (so) But I-how should I dare? By whose permission? I am. not Aeneas. I am. not Paul Who could believe me worthy of the vision? How, then, may I presume to this high quest and not fear my own brashness? You are wise and will grasp what my poor words can but suggest." As one who unwiUs what he wills, will stay strong purposes with feeble second thoughts untO he sPells all his first zeal awayso I hung back and balked on that dim coast till thjnking had worn out my enterprise, so stout at starting and so early lost. "I undentand from your words and the look in your eyes," that shadow of magnjficence answered me, "your soul is sunken in that cowardice (45) that bears down many men. turning their course and resolution by imagined perils. as his own shadow tuma the frightened hone. To free you of this dread I will tell you all of why I came to you and what I heard when fust 1 pitied you. I was a soul among the souls of Limbo, when a Lady so blessed and so beautiful. I prayed her to order and command my will. called to me. Her eyes were kindled from. the lamps of Heaven. Her voice reachedthrough me, tender, sweet,and low. An anger. voice, a music of its own: '0 gracious Mantuan whose melodies live in earth'. memory and sha11live on till the last motion ceases in the skies, (60) my dearest friend, and fortune's foe, has strayed onto a friendless shore and stands beset by such distresses that he turns afraid from the True Way, and news of him in Heaven rumors my dread he is already lost. I come, afraid that I am too-late risen. VIRGIL SPEAKS 01' BEATRICE Fly to him and with your high counsel, pity, and with whatever need be for his good. and soul's salvation, help him, and solace me. It is I, Beatrice, who send you to him. I come from the blessed height for which I yearn. Love called me here. When amid Seraphim I stand again before my Lord, your praises shall sound in Heaven.' She paused, and I began: '0 Lady of that only grace that raises feeble mankind within its mortal cycle above all other works God's will has placed within the heaven of the smallest circle. 10 welcome is your command that to my sense, were it already fulfilled, it would yet seem tardy. I understand. and am all obedience.

Dante Alighieri · Inferno (unspecified translation)

For the group member, the Great Individual is primarily the carrier of projections. The unconscious psychic wholeness of the collective is experienced in the person of the Great Individual, who is at once the group self and the unconscious self of each member. What is present in every part of the group as the unconscious creative totality of the psyche, namely the self, becomes visible in the Great Individual or, at a higher level, is actualized in his life. The collective parts are still childishly dependent, with no ego center, no responsibility or will of their own to mark them off from the collective, so that the Great Individual is regarded as the directive force, as the very center of life, and is institutionally honored as such. It is therefore completely inadmissible to reduce him to, or derive him from, the personal father figure. We find that, just as in the early history of man the Great Individyal becomes the carrier for the projection of archetypal images such as the self, the mana figure, the hero, and the father archetype, so also in the course of ontogenetic development the figure representing authority, who in our civilization is the father, frequently becomes the carrier for these projections. But it is by no means only the father archetype that is projected upon him; very often it is quite another image, for instance that of the magician, the wise old man, the hero or, conversely, of the devil, death, and SO on.

Erich Neumann · The Origins and History of Consciousness

The exhaustion of emotional components and the ego's alienation from the world of archetypal images result in its inability to react to sense-images at all, a fact which is particularly noticeable in modem man. Confrontation with an unconscious image, or even with an unexpected situation, finds him immune to reaction. Contrasted with the instantaneous reflex action of the primitive, the interval between situation and reaction is extraordinarily prolonged, if it is not abrogated altogether. Loss of affectivity and emotionality, still further increased by the specialized differentiation of consciousness into separate functions, is certainly an essential condition of conscious activity and has undoubtedly helped modem man in his scientfic pursuits, but it has a formidable shadow side. To the extent that conscious knowledge necessitates the suppression of emotional components, it is typical of and only advantageous to noncreative work. Creative processes, on the other hand, cannot and must not exclude powerfully emotional, and even excitatory, components; indeed they seem to be a necessary ingredient here. Every new conception and every creative idea comprise elements which up to that point were unconscious, and the inclusion of the emotional components associated with unconscious contents produces an excitation. The connection of the conscious system with the emotionally toned substrata of the unconscious alone makes creativity possible. Therefore, if carried to extremes, the differentiating and emotion-repressing trend of Western development has a sterilizing effect and hampers the widening of consciousness. This is confirmed by the fact that creative people always have something childlike and not fully differentiated about them; they are plasmatic centers of creativity, and it is quite beside the point to call such features "infantile" and try to reduce them to the level of the family Romance.

Erich Neumann · The Origins and History of Consciousness

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the "good old days"; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary. The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened. The civilization that is about ' to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men. Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole. By this standard the Napoleonic wars were minor coups $&at, and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its Narrowness.

Erich Neumann · The Origins and History of Consciousness

“People and things draw importunately near, all experiences strike deep, memory js a gathering wound. To be ill is a sort of resentment in itse!!! Against this resentment the invalid has only one great remedy-I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism which is free from revolt, and with which the Russian soldier, to whom a campaign proves unbearable, ultimately lays himself down in the snow. To accept· nothing more, to undertake nothing more, to absorb nothing more-to cease entirely from reacting. . . . The tremendous sagacity of this fatalism, which does not always imply merely the courage for death, but which in the most dangerous cases may actually constitute a self-preservative measure, amounts to a reduction of activity in the vital functions, the slackening down of which is like a sort of will to hibernate. A few steps farther in this direction we find the fakir, who will sleep for weeks in a tomb . .. . . . Owing to the fact that one would be used up too . quickly if one reacted, one no longer reacts at all : this is the principle.”

Friedrich Nietzsche · Ecce Homo

War, on the other hand, is something different. At heart I am a warrior. Attacking belongs to my instincts. To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy-maybe these things presuppose a strong nature; in any case all strong natures involve these things. Such natures need resistance, consequently they go in search of obstacles : the pathos of aggression belongs of necessity to strength as much as the feelings of revenge and of rancour belong to weakness. [woman, for in-. :.\ _w stance, is revengeful ; her weakness involves this passion, just as it involves her susceptibility in the presence of other people's suffering. The strength of tqe aggressor can be measured by the opposition which he needs ; every increase of growth betrays itself by a seeking out of more formidable opponents--or problems : for a philosopher who - is combative challenges even problems to a duel. The task is not to overcome opponents in general, but only those opponents against whom one has to summon all one's strength, one's skill, and one's swordsmanship-in fact, opponents who are one's equals .... To be one's enemy's equal-this is the first condition of an honourable duel. Where one despises, one cannot wage war. Where one commands, where one sees something beneath one, one ougkt not to wage war. ~ war tactics can be reduced to four principles : First, I attack )( only things that are triumphant-1 necessary I 'wait until they become triumphant. Secondly, I attack only those things _against which I find no allies, against which I stand alone-against which I compromise nobody but myself. • . . I have not yet taken one single step before the public eye, which did not compromise me : that is my criterion of a proper mode of action. Thirdly, I never make personal attacks-I use a personality merely as a magnifying-glass, by means of which I render a general, but elusive and scarcely noticeable evil, more apparent. In this way I attacked David Strauss, or rather the success given to a senile book by the cultured classes of Germany -by this means I caught German culture redhanded. In this way I attacked Wagner, or rather the falsity or mongrel instincts of our " culture " which confounds the super-refined with the strong, and the effete with the great. Fourthly, I attack only those things from which all personal differences are excluded, in which any such thing as a background of disagreeable experiences is lacking . . On the contrary, attacking is to me a proof of goodwill and, in certain circumstances, of gratitude. By means of it, I do honour to a thing, I distinguish a thing ; whether I associate my name with that of an institution or a person, by being against or for either, is all the same to me. If I wage war against Christianity, I feel justified in doing so, because in that quarter I have met with no fatal experiences and difficulties-the most earnest Christians have always been kindly disposed to me. I, personally, the most essential opponent of Christianity, am far from holding the individual responsible for what is the fatality of long ages.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Ecce Homo

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Marilyn Strathern · “Improving ratings”: audit in the British University system (1997), discussing Goodhart’s law

He whose vision cannot cover History’s three thousand years, Must in outer darkness hover, Live within the day’s frontiers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · West–Eastern Divan

"As soon as I wake the first thought that occurs to me every morning is that I am happy. Beating within my chest is a child's heart; the life of a new day awaits me... We should let the poets' attentive and admiring gaze penetrate beneath the surface of things, so as to glimpse to beaty that hides itself in each thing and allow the beauty to shape every action and thought."

Takashi Nagai · The Bells of Nagasaki (notebook source marked uncertain for first passage)

“Go to the mountains and meditate! If you stay in the hurly-burly of this world, you'll run around in circles without ever finding your way. You'll become the kind of person who just stamps and screams. But the blue mountains are immovable and the white clouds come and go.”

Takashi Nagai · The Bells of Nagasaki (notebook source marked uncertain for first passage)

"If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos”

Plutarch · On Alexander’s Fortune or Virtue

EVERY man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist ; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute ; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. There is a passage, indeed, in the Eudemian Ethics which looks like an exception ; but I doubt not of its being spurious, as that whole work is supposed by some to bo. With Plato ideas are constitutive in thomselves. Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding ; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths. Yet what a mind was Aristotle’s—only not the greatest that ever animated the human form ! —the parent of science, properly so called, the master of criticism, and the founder or editor of logic ! But he confounded science with philosophy, which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Table Talk (1835)

In science the Apollonian tends to develop established lines to perfection, while the Dionysian rather relies on intuition and is more likely to open new, unexpected alleys for research...The future of mankind depends on the progress of science, and the progress of science depends on the support it can find. Support mostly takes the form of grants, and the present methods of distributing grants unduly favor the Apollonian.

Albert Szent-Györgyi · Dionysians and Apollonians (Science, 1972)

Startup is an enterprise that is nearly out of business all the time.

Jensen Huang · Stanford lecture (2011)

To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye.

William Wordsworth · Motto printed on Nature first-issue masthead, November 4, 1869

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Without asking, or warning, she snatches us up into her circling dance, and whirls us on until we are tired, and drop from her arms.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She is ever shaping new forms: what is, has never yet been; what has been, comes not again. Everything is new, and yet nought but the old.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals. She is always building up and destroying; but her workshop is inaccessible.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Her life is in her children; but where is the mother? She is the only artist; working-up the most uniform material into utter opposites; arriving, without a trace of effort, at perfection, at the most exact precision, though always veiled under a certain softness.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Each of her works has an essence of its own; each of her phenomena a special characterisation: and yet their diversity is in unity.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She performs a play; we know not whether she sees it herself, and yet she acts for us, the lookers-on.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Incessant life, development, and movement are in her, but she advances not. She changes for ever and ever, and rests not a moment. Quietude is inconceivable to her, and she has laid her curse upon rest. She is firm. Her steps are measured, her exceptions rare, her laws unchangeable.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, but as Nature. She broods over an all-comprehending idea, which no searching can find out.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Mankind dwell in her and she in them. With all men she plays a game for love, and rejoices the more they win. With many, her moves are so hidden, that the game is over before they know it.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

That which is most unnatural is still Nature; the stupidest philistinism has a touch of her genius. Whoso cannot see her everywhere, sees her nowhere rightly.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She loves herself, and her innumerable eyes and affections are fixed upon herself. She has divided herself that she may be her own delight. She causes an endless succession of new capacities for enjoyment to spring up, that her insatiable sympathy may be assuaged.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She rejoices in illusion. Whoso destroys it in himself and others, him she punishes with the sternest tyranny. Whoso follows her in faith, him she takes as a child to her bosom.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Her children are numberless. To none is she altogether miserly; but she has her favourites, on whom she squanders much, and for whom she makes great sacrifices. Over greatness she spreads her shield.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She tosses her creatures out of nothingness, and tells them not whence they came, nor whither they go. It is their business to run, she knows the road.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Her mechanism has few springs—but they never wear out, are always active and manifold.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

She wraps man in darkness, and makes him for ever long for light. She creates him dependent upon the earth, dull and heavy; and yet is always shaking him until he attempts to soar above it.

Georg Christoph Tobler · “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe” (Nature, November 4, 1869), English translation by T. H. Huxley

Above all let us say it slowly . . . This preface is late but not too late - what, after all, do five or six years matter? A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of Lento. It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: - in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste - a malicious taste, perhaps? - no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is ' in a hurry'. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow - it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it Lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book: - this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers ... My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!

Friedrich Nietzsche · Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 1881

Each of us, when fortunate, is compelled forward by something that grips our attention—love of a person; a sport; a political, sociological, or economic problem, or a scientific question; a passion for art, literature, or drama—something that calls to us for reasons we can neither control nor understand (try to make yourself interested in something you just do not care about and see how well that works). The phenomena that grip us : from the Greek word i, “to appear, or to be (phenomena Phainestha brought to light”) are like lamps along a dark path: they are part of the unconscious processes devoted to integrating and furthering the development of our spirits, the furtherance of our psychological development. You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. Something manifests itself out of the darkness as compelling, as worth living for; following that, something moves us further down the road, to the next meaningful manifestation—and so it goes, as we continue to seek, develop, grow, and thrive. It is a perilous journey, but it is also the adventure of our lives. Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process. Think, as well, of the traveling you have done, or of the work you have undertaken, whether for pleasure or necessity. In all these cases you experience what is new. Sometimes that is painful; sometimes it is better than anything else that has ever happened to you. Either way, it is deeply informative. It is all part of the potential of the world, calling you into Being, changing you forever—for better or worse—in consequence of your pursuit.

Jordan B. Peterson · Beyond Order 2021

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

Albert Einstein · Letter to Robert Thornton (1944; notebook spells Thorton)