Zino A > Zino's Quotes

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
― T.S. Eliot

“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.”
― Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

“We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“Observing and understanding are two different things.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between

“I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments.”
― Jim Morrison

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Half the truth is a whole lie.”
― William Collins, The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect

“Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
― Jacques Lacan

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955

“Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.”
― Jacques Lacan

“You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won't mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever.... connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“If you're reading this...
Congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about,
then I don't know what is.”
― Chad Sugg, Monsters Under Your Head

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“أرقى النفوس هي التي تجرعت الألم فتجنبت أن تذيق الآخرين مرارته

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The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
― Maya Angelou

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain