"You're assuming," said Dr. Robert, "that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours."
"Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hilter's words -- people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history -- sadism vs. duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are ..."
"... family ... It's freedom, if you like -- but freedom in a telephone booth."
"If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don't take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they're apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches ..."
"Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment."
"A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time."
"People ... are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture."
"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way."
"The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering."
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"Eternity," he answered. "Believe it or not, it's as real as shit."
"The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone."
"The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night."
Great quotes. "The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night." I think of that one every so often as I see attempts by people to bring down the progress we've made
ReplyDeleteIt does seem appropriate to our current age, doesn't it?
ReplyDelete"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way." Excellent quote this one. Thanks for sharing!!
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