Philip > Philip's Quotes

“A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn't reject anyone.
He is ready to use all situations
and doesn't waste anything.
This is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man's job?
If you don't understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.”
― Laozi, Tao Te Ching

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Truth suffers from too much analysis.

-Ancient Fremen Saying”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape. Only when complementary views of the same reality combine are we capable of achieving fuller access to the knowledge of things.”
― Alexander Grothendieck

“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!”
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

“Production'' is thus simultaneously a variation on a male fantasy of child­ birth, and of the action of a male Creator God who similarly created the entire universe through the sheer power of his mind and words, just as men see themselves as creating the world from their minds and brawn, and see that as the essence of "work;' leaving to women most of the actual labor of tidying and maintaining things to make this illusion possible.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Many in life esteem themselves great men
who then will wallow here like pigs in mud,
leaving behind them their repulsive fame.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
― James Baldwin

“Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
― Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos

“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table. Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“People will try to understand me and to frame me in their words. They will seek truth. But the truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden by John Steinbeck: A Timeless Tale of Family, Free Will, and the Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil

“You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“A thought comes when it will, not when I will.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“And, indeed, our intellectual as well as our ethical education is corrupt. It is permeated by the admiration of brilliance, of the way things are said, which takes the place of a critical appreciation of the things that are said (and the things that are done). It is permeated by this romantic idea of the splendour of the State of History on which we are actors. We are educated to act with an eye to the gallery.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. II

“But this historicism, with its Substitution of certainty for hope, must lead to a moral futurism. ' The law cannot be broken.' So we can be sure, on psychological grounds, that whatever we do will lead to the same result ; that even fascism must, in the end, lead to that commonwealth ; so that the final outcome does not depend upon our moral decision, and that there is no need to worry over our responsibilities. If we are told that we can be certain, on scientific grounds that 'the last will be first and the first will be last', what else is this but the substitution of historical prophecy for conscience ?”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume Two: Hegel and Marx

“The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“The domination of other living things has become total and so boring.”
― Larry Mitchell