[sciborg2]

But, as always, the key to making sense of our lives lies in those details that seem most nonsensical. The small strangenesses surrounding us are our best possible clues to reality.
 —Peter Kingsley, Reality

[sciborg2]

"To understand mind one must understand matter.
To understand matter one must understand space and time.
And to understand space and time one must understand mind."
 -Peter Sjöstedt-H

[BeardFisher-King]

"A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out. " - Dr. Samuel Johnson

[Francis Buck]

"The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
- William Faulkner

[Francis Buck]

“I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
- Hegel's thoughts on Napoleon 

[sciborg2]

No culture is able to achieve the integral fullness of the real, nor can any develop all the potentialities of the human being, for the latter is always in excess of itself. . . . Each culture explores certain sectors of the real, privileges and develops certain dimensions of experience, and, because of this fact, sacrifices other dimensions, other possibilities, which return to haunt it (the return of the repressed!), against which the culture protects itself through a number of mechanisms.
  —BERTRAND MÉHEUST, Le défi du magnetisme

[sciborg2]

"When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that’s not criticism; it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can."
  -Ursula Le Guin

[sciborg2]

“When the layman says ‘reality’, he usually thinks that he is talking about something evident and well-known; by contrast it seems to me that it is the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time to work out a new idea of reality. . . . What I have in mind concerning such a new idea of reality, is – in provisional terms – the idea of the reality of the symbol.On the one hand, a symbol is a product of human effort, on the other hand it indicates an objective order in the cosmos of which humans are only a part."
 -Wolfgang Pauli

[Francis Buck]

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

[sciborg2]

Walking along a mountain path in Japan, we come upon a rudimentary hermitage with a large temple bell suspended from a simple   wooden pagoda.   Unlike Western carillon bells, the Japanese bell has no clapper and is struck on the outside much as one might strike a gong....Admiring the excellence  and  obvious  age of  the engravings on the  casting, we hear the footsteps of the temple priest and turn to ask,  “How old is this extraordinary bell?”

Touching  his  palm  to  the  massive  casting, he  responds,  “This  is about five hundred years old, but” (removing his hand to point into  the  black  void  within  the  bell)  “the emptiness within—that’s eternal”..
 --Thomas P. Kasulis

[sciborg2]

'Where the roots of Western culture ... considered the aim of life the perfection of man, modern man is concerned with the perfection of things, and the knowledge of how to make them.'
  – Erich Fromm

[sciborg2]

"Physically we are alone. But in the imagination we are surrounded by distant friends, and their whisperings are our science, our mathematics, our culture."
 -Terrence McKenna

[sciborg2]

'The trouble with this fellow [the academic materialist] is that no one ever mixed raven's blood with his mother's milk. He is marvelously and uncannily bereft of any sense that existence is odd.'
  - Alan Watts

[Wilshire]

I think it was themerchant who brought this quote to my attention, I love it:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-Max Planck (German Physicist)

[sciborg2]

'The idea of ... empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience in which there is no room for any sort of dichotomy.'
 - Daisetsu T. Suzuki