Frank > Frank's Quotes

“The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practice them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self–evident to the foreigner are absurd.”
― W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage: Original and Unabridged

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
― Francis Bacon

“The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.”
― David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

“The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.”
― Dennis Potter

“any day when he could personify American primitivism was a good ol’ day. It meant that he was still alive, and sometimes even the carnival coon in the dunk tank misses the attention. And this country, the latent high school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. ”

Excerpt From: Paul Beatty. “The Sellout.” iBooks.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.”
― Amartya Sen

“The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut of beliefs, faiths and even tongues. An omniscient kind of social filter swallowed up those foreign bodies and spat them out again as burghers: civically salubrious and residentially reliable.”
― Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

“When I was finishing my studies in philosophy and preparing to apply for a job, I got some advice about what to say in the interviews.. I should expect to be asked why it is worth studying the history of philosophy at all. The right answer, I was told, is that we can mine the history of philosophy to discover arguments and positions that would speak to today’s concerns... So I prepared myself to say, preferably with a straight face, that contemporary philosophers of the 1990s could learn a thing or two from my doctoral dissertation.

In my heart, I never really believed that this is the only, or even the best, rationale for studying the history of philosophy. Certainly, historical texts have contributed to contemporary debates.. Others seem almost to transcend the time they were written… But to me, much of the fascination of the historical figures is how far they were from our ways of thinking, rather than how up-to-date we can make them seem... I find it fascinating that long-dead philosophers assumed certain things to be obviously true which now seem obviously false, and that they built elaborate systems on these exotic foundations. To be useful, historical ideas don’t always need to fit neatly into our ways of thinking. They can shake us out of those ways of thinking, helping us to see that our own assumptions are a product of a specific time and place.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“..it is as if the left hemisphere .. creates a .. self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits .. the routes of escape .. have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised word, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and feelings of emptiness has come about, reflecting .. the unopposed action of the dysfunctional left hemisphere.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“If .. one can never step into the same river twice .. one will always be taken unawares by experience .. nothing can ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow. Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways. In one, we experience - the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we experience in a special way: a re-presented version .. containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention.. it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us to for the first time to know.. This gives us power.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky.”
― Ovid

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“..Then he continued questioning me: “What school do you stand for?” I answered, “It is my own theory; it is called logotherapy.” “Can you tell me in one sentence what is meant by logotherapy?” he asked. “At least, what is the difference between psychoanalysis and logotherapy?” “Yes,” I said, “but in the first place, can you tell me in one sentence what you think the essence of psychoanalysis is?” This was his answer: “During psychoanalysis, the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell.”“Whereupon I immediately retorted with the following improvisation: “Now, in logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear.”
― Viktor Frankl

“..It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils...
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”
― Viktor Frankl

“MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian's permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union.

Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination of hope.

In any case, I shall remain,

    Yours with sincere devotion,
     EDWARD CASAUBON”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“We think in generalities, but we live in details.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.”
― Arthur Koestler

“We are in the habit of visualizing .. the history of science as a steady, cumulative process,.. where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height.. In fact, .. the philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries .. were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.. Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment..”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“..First, we need to get clear on the subject matter of mathematics. What is mathematics about? Is it really concerned with abstract objects..? We obviously need to listen to what mathematics itself has to say.. As Frege emphasized, however, the questions are also in part concerned with language. How should the language of mathematics be analyzed? Should apparent talk about numbers and sets be taken at face value? This concern with language means that we shall also need assistance from linguistics and perhaps also psychology. Second, we need to understand how mathematicians.. settle on their first principles (or axioms), and how do they use these to prove mathematical results (or theorems)? .. The challenge is to make our answers to these two sets of questions mesh. How is it that our ways of forming mathematical beliefs are responsive to what mathematics is about? How are the practices and mechanisms by which we arrive at our mathematical beliefs conducive to finding out about whatever reality mathematics describes? In short, why is it not just a happy accident that our mathematical beliefs tend to be true? There must be something about what we do that keeps us on the right track., Since the challenge is to integrate the metaphysics of mathematics (namely, what mathematics is about) with its epistemology (namely, how we form our mathematical beliefs), we shall call this the integration challenge.”
― Øystein Linnebo

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch foul slanders against their betters and to offer them up as victims to the evil deity of popular envy.”
― Plutarch

“In the beginning, everything was void, and J. H. W. H. Conway began to create numbers. Conway said, "Let there be two rules which bring forth all numbers large and small. This shall be the first rule: Every number corresponds to two sets of previously created numbers, such that no member of the left set is greater than or equal to any member of the right set. And the second rule shall be this: One number is less than or equal to another number if and only if no member of the first number's left set is greater than or equal to the second number, and no member of the second number's right set is less than or equal to the first number." And Conway examined these two rules he had made, and behold! They were very good.
…
And Conway said, "Let the numbers be added to each other in this wise: The left set of the sum of two numbers shall be the sums of all left parts of each number with the other; and in like manner the right set shall be from the right parts, each according to its kind." Conway proved that every number plus zero is unchanged, and he saw that addition was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And Conway said, "Let the negative of a number have as its sets the negatives of the number's opposite sets; and let subtraction be addition of the negative." And it was so. Conway proved that subtraction was the inverse of addition, and this was very good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And Conway said to the numbers, "Be fruitful and multiply. Let part of one number be multiplied by another and added to the product of the first number by part of the other, and let the product of the parts be subtracted. This shall be done in all possible ways, yielding a number in the left set of the product when the parts are of the same kind, but in the right set when they are of opposite kinds." Conway proved that every number times one is unchanged. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And behold! When the numbers had been created for infinitely many days, the universe itself appeared. And the evening and the morning were N day.

And Conway looked over all the rules he had made for numbers, and saw that they were very, very good.”
― Donald Moses Knuth