“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
– George Orwell

“Ich bin am Ziel, [...] hören Sie mich an. Ich liebe das Leben, – dies ist ein Geständnis. Nehmen Sie es und bewahren Sie es, – ich habe es noch keinem gemacht. Man hat es gesagt, man hat es sogar geschrieben und drucken lassen, dass ich das Leben hasse oder fürchte oder verachte oder verabscheue. Ich habe dies gern gehört, es hat mir geschmeckt; aber darum ist es nicht weniger falsch. Ich liebe das Leben … “

(aus “Tonio Kröger”, von Thomas Mann)

A dear friend of mine sent me this five-minute Youtube video about two years ago in which Richard Feynman talks about doubt, uncertainty and religion. I like it a lot and have therefore quoted it many times since.

I was excited when I found a lecture yesterday Feynman gave as part of a lecture series in 2011. A transcript of the speech was posted on a blog, and after reading it on the airplane today and decided to repost it.

There are some typos in the original transcript, I corrected a couple, but it is a very long text, and I’m sure you’ll be able to read it, even with some mistakes in it.

Some things I don’t agree with, but there are many things we can learn a lot from. I will post the most important quotes first – if you’re in a hurry, at least read these – and then post the whole lecture below the excerpt.

Excerpt:

‎If you ask [any scientist] intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that.
[…] Read the rest of this entry »

“But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers’ wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy, but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.”

“Úrsula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications.”

“More than a bookstore, it looked like a dump for used books, which were placed in disorder on the shelves chewed by termites, in the corners sticky with cobwebs, and even in the spaces that were supposed to serve as passageways. On a long table, also heaped with old books and papers, the proprietor was writing tireless prose in purple letters, somewhat outlandish, and on the loose pages of a school notebook. He had a handsome head of silver hair which fell down over his forehead like the plume of a cockatoo, and his blue eyes, lively and close-set, revealed the gentleness of a man who had read all of the books.”

– One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garciá Márquez

“If in doubt, err on the side of caution.”
- Blaise Pascal (see Pascal’s Wager)

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful.
It is by abandonment.

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man`s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Circles: An Essay.”

Source: Great Literature Online via S.

All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.

– John Stuart Mill (1872). A System of Logic (Bk III, Ch. 6, Sec. 1, 8th edn), Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer

” ‘Refinement’ is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether ‘refined’ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.”

– William James, Pragmatism, 1907

“I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.”
[...]
“For several years I was almost mad … You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood … After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”

I wonder if he ever met Vigeland.