The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

In all things, across all avenues, a choice must be made: whether to follow love, truth, or power. That choice will consume the chooser. If he follows only love then his wellbeing will be constantly at the mercy of another, though his highs will be sublime. If he follows truth then it will be a lonely journey, but potentially a noble one. If he should follow power though, not only will he come to know a desperate and revolting loneliness, but he will also never experience even a drop of satisfaction in anything.

Meaning is in short supply and distractions are everywhere.

I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted myself. Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.

This is the hallmark of a wise culture. It seeks to know the divine and the ill in equal measure and lays its head at night on neither of those pillows exclusively.

If philosophers gave clear answers then surely the whole field would've died out with the Greeks.

A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants. That’s a very old quote from a very dead philosopher.

Beauty is nice and virtue is attractive, but nothing is more gorgeous than meeting another creature who shares your deepest values.

Let’s pause for a second and acknowledge how easy it is to love from afar. One might see this person three or four times a week, and always in situations where difficulties needn’t crop up. Since the two of you never face a challenge, it is possible to imagine the object of your affection to be free of pettiness, stupidity, self-obsession, and all the other frequent visitors to the human psyche.

Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.

He had the machine remove his tendency to procrastinate, which as gods in this story we are able to learn was hardly particular to Dr. Ek, but common to almost all sentient lifeforms in the galaxy.

a scientist is really just a person trained to watch things very closely.

He couldn’t stand watching everyone’s faces go from neutral to suddenly smiling the second the camera was raised, then back to neutral again. It made him feel unwell.

All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. One is inseparable from the other. No system of knowledge can avoid this limitation. Numbers are not the true face of measure. Words are not the true description of things. The world is the explanation.