For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life.
William Barrett
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Performative authenticity, being merely average or well adjusted, or without a cultivated portfolio of special competencies and attractive qualities, is a mark of failure – a mark of inauthenticity – regardless of your inner life and relation to self.
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How disquieting to realize that reality is illusion, at best a democratization of perception based on participant consensus.
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“This is not a democracy. It’s mob rule.”
“What is the difference?”
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An inquisitive mind and habit of learning is so much more important than the learned knowledge for an academic.
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Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
David Hume
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Looking into the past and training ourselves to see with the eyes of other cultures, are powerful ways of de-naturalising our inherited conceptual categories, and of recognising that they are not inevitable.
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If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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In place of the traditional academic values of self-discipline and intellectual mastery, they valued existential authenticity and emotional or sexual liberation.
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It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.
There is a necessary irrationality in faith.
Faith is the strength of life.
Irvin Yalom
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Sub specie aeternitatis.
(From the perspective of the eternal.)
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La belle indifference.
(A paradoxical absence of psychological distress despite having a serious medical illness or symptoms related to a health condition.)
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Humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud, hurtling thought the void.
William, Westworld
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For the most part, humanity has been a miserable little band of thugs, stumbling from one catastrophe to the next. Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic.
Serac, Westworld
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The human intellect is like peacock feathers, just an extravagant display intended to attract mates.
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Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground