Gustav Martling > Gustav's Quotes

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
― Spinoza

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― Douglas Hofstadter

“How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
― Spinoza

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”
― Benedict de Spinoza

“I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind...

to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)”
― Albert Einstein