If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential — for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the [...]
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering.
—Thomas Merton
Life is thick sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to [...]
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—Edgar Allen Poe
Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
—John Locke, Of Reading
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are [...]
Just because yours is smaller doesn’t make you less of a man. Unless we’re talking about your brain.
When I was a student, in the days before I had covered my walls with art, I used to decorate with words. I would take those cheap 8.5 x 11 frames you could buy at the grocery store, and fill them with nicely formatted blocks of text–poems, quotes, things like that. I’ve always liked to [...]
You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment:
I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science [...]
There’s a misunderstanding that the right-hand-path in spirituality, to use a short hand term, is about abasing or losing yourself or demolishing yourself. Not true at all. It’s simply about being in right relationship to the divine source of consciousness, and the Bodhisatvas who try to mitigate, and eventually end, the world’s suffering. But it’s [...]
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear [...]
Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: (1) No sea-creature is less than two [...]
I had one of those shocking epiphanies today. I realized, seriously, completely, viscerally, that I am going to die someday.
There was no hair-raising event, no near death experience, nothing dramatic. Just a realization that hit me during a very long drive, when I had some time to think about what it meant. Harlan Ellison is [...]
That’s the video for the World Party song Is It Like Today?.
The reason it’s here: it’s explicitly inspired by, and intended to be a precis of, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.
Lyrics after the jump:
A while back my wife passed me a PDF copy of an academic paper entitled “Polite, well-dressed and on time: secondary school conduct codes and the production of docile citizens” by Brock University researcher Rebecca Raby. The citation shows the paper as having originally been published in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology; Feb [...]
From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about [...]
I read a lot of magazines–oddly more offline than on. I think this is because my online reading tends to be wide-ranging, shallow, and driven by references from other sources–there are few “online magazines” that I find myself reading “cover to cover”, as it were. Interesting magazines tend to be composed of pieces that are [...]
Alex Wilson
KiraKira
Mr. McLaren
Richard B.Mr. McLaren
BiffMr. McLarenMr. McLarenKira