Ali > Ali's Quotes

“I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading.”
― Gerald Murnane

“to be of greater use, the rules need to be remolded so that they are more precise and accurate, less egocentric, and more elastic . When rules are discovered to be false, self-defeating, or unworkable, they have to be dropped from the repertoire.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future. Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colors beyond violet: the senses cannot conceive what may lie past the visible end of the spectrum. In a world without future, each parting of friends is death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without a future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“A world without memory is a world of the present. The past exists only in books, in documents...A spinster sees the face of the young man who loved her in the mirror of her bedroom, on the ceiling of the bakery, on the surface of the lake, in the sky. The tragedy of this world in that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this time in that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“It is a tragic and strange fact , a superb malice of the creator , that man's mind is so immensely better suited for handling what is irrelevant than what is relevant to him.”
― Hermann Weyl, Mind and Nature: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics

“Understanding natural language is a paradigm case of undercoded abductive inference.”
― Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

“Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“...it is sad, of course, to forget.
But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.
To remember when no one else does.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“In one classic carnival celebration called the “feast of fools,” a fool is elected king. The real king (old authority and truth) is brought down—metaphorically killed—so that the king of fools (a new authority, a new truth) can emerge. When the fool’s reign is over at carnival’s end, his kingly disguise is removed and he retakes his place as a clown. But the fool doesn’t “die” in vain—he has led the hierarchy and the folk through metamorphosis. Dying brings change and rebirth.”
― Josef Steiff, Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy: The Footprints of a Gigantic Mind

“From the point of view of genes in any male body, the body itself is a sinking prison ship. Death comes to all bodies sooner or later. Even if a male devoted all of his energy to surviving, by storing up huge fat reserves and hiding in an armored underground compound, statistics guarantee that an accident would sooner or later kill him. This paranoid survivalist strategy is no way to spread one's genes through a population. The only deliverance for a male's genes is through an escape tube into a female body carrying a fertile egg. Genes can survive in the long term only by jumping ship into offspring. In species that reproduce sexually, the only way to make offspring is to merge one's genes with another individual's. And the only way to do that, for males, is to attract a female of the species through courtship. This is why males of most species evolve to act as if copulation is the whole point of life. For male genes, copulation is the gateway to immortality. This is why males risk their lives for copulation opportunities.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“Why must I, this being, be like this? In life, I had formed for myself no image of myself. Why, then, must I see myself in that body there, why must I see in it an inevitable image of myself?”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“I saw then my father for the first time, as I had never seen him before, externalized in his own life, but not as he had been to himself, not as he had felt himself to be, which was something I could never know; but rather, as a being that was wholly strange to me, in that reality which, as I now be held him, I might suppose that others had imposed upon him.”
― Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

“Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.”
― Greg McKeown, Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

“You don’t have to be overwhelmed by essential projects. Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps. It doesn’t matter if your project involves ten steps or a thousand. When you adopt this strategy, all you have to focus on is the very first step.”
― Greg McKeown, Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

“This is a trap I cannot ride away from. I guess there are those times in life. It's like staring at the ground as you fall from a height. Seeing the end coming doesn't mean you can dodge it, fix it, stop it.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“his knees. I ask him if he tried to rape Nyla. “Laws are silent in times of war,” Tactus drawls. “Don’t quote Cicero to me,” I say. “You are held to a higher standard than a marauding centurion.” “In that, you’re hitting the mark at least. I am a superior creature descended from proud stock and glorious heritage. Might makes right, Darrow. If I can take, I may take. If I do take, I deserve to have. This is what Peerless believe.” “The measure of a man is what he does when he has power,” I say loudly.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair.”
― Kate Darling, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots

“Regret was a curse without a cure, except to forget.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, Nyphron Rising

“There was no purpose to pain at all. “I don’t believe in suffering.”
― Katie Engelhart, The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die

“Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, is a powerful illumination of how we really behave toward animals.”
― Kate Darling, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots

“the only reason any of us are alive is because we haven’t figured out how to die.”
― Katie Engelhart, The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die

“if you found yourself on the wrong side of that exponential equation, you were completely screwed.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“You sit right there by the window and try to find that way out. The one that isn’t there.”
― Stephen King, Finders Keepers

“a mind is a brain that is conscious.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Why are men so much more prone to becoming suicide terrorists?

Why is suicide terrorism so much more prevalent in polygynous cultures that create a greater pool of mateless males?”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“You don't need a rocket ship to dislocate your there-and-now rather violently, if the “there” is far enough away, because the effect increases with distance. Suppose you put down this book, get up from your chair, and walk across the room. You have just changed your there-and-now in the Andromeda galaxy by a whole day! What I mean by this statement is that, while sedentary, you can deduce that a certain event E on a certain planet in Andromeda is happening at the same moment (as judged by you, in your particular frame of reference) as the act of “you reading this passage.” When you walk across the room, the event on that distant planet which is simultaneous with your ambulation suddenly changes from “just after E” to some other event which differs from E by a day. It jumps either into the future or past of E, depending on whether you are walking towards or away from Andromeda at the time. Thus simultaneity, like motion, is relative.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

“I quite like the idea that we live in a computer simulation. It gives me hope that things will be better on the next level.”
― Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

“While funerals are among the saddest events that we humans can participate in, at least they are definitive moments marking change: from living to dead. But perhaps even sadder is the life near its end, such as a human with a fatal malady given a highly definitive death sentence.”
― Peter D. Ward, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth