Comment

Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 10:29am

"Wisdom Can Tolerate Doubt"

What Socrates teaches us:

He felt it was vitally important to admit that the human condition is one of profound uncertainty, deep doubt. We are in between creatures. On the one hand, we are not ignorant and un-self-aware like most other animals. We can learn much. But on the other hand, we are not omniscient and all-seeing like the gods. This is why the lust for certainty is a sin, as a former Archbishop of York put it, because certainty demands the eradication of doubts and imagining you are a god.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 22, 2012 at 12:30am

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.  - Gary Snyder

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 21, 2012 at 11:33pm

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

 

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?

 

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.

 

 -- Sir Leslie Stephen

English writer on philosophy and literary history. He was also one of the leading British mountaineers of his generation, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Thackeray's son-in-law and Virginia Woolf's father.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 20, 2012 at 11:42am

The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? -John Muir, naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

Comment by Michel on April 16, 2012 at 6:38pm

Great!

Comment by Davy on April 16, 2012 at 5:43pm

Emerson.
 A sufficient measure of civilisation is the influence of good women.

Comment by doone on April 13, 2012 at 6:41pm

A True “Science Guy.”

Apr. 13, 2012

Comment by Marianne on April 13, 2012 at 4:49pm

@Don, I have to read how the quote you posted continues...  I'm intensely curious...  Great that you wrote where it came from exactly,  thanks

Comment by Adriana on April 13, 2012 at 4:38pm

The part I do not understand of this quote is, ALL experts are by definition mammals! No need to picture them as mammals, that's what they are. We should picture all experts as insects :-)

Comment by doone on April 13, 2012 at 4:31pm

Quote For The Day

by Zoë Pollock

"Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you," - Hitchens, from Letters to a Young Contrarian. Today would have been his 63rd birthday.

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