Reginald > Reginald's Quotes

“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage - his name is self; he dwells in your body, he is your body.

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It is the richness of a personality, the fullness of it, its power to flow over and to bestow, its instinctive feeling of ease, and its affirmative attitude towards itself, that creates great love and great sacrifices: these passions proceed from strong and godlike personalism as surely as do the desire to be master, to obtrude, and the inner certainty that one has a right to everything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Ask “Why?” as many times as may be necessary to get to the root cause of the problem and then fix it so it can never occur again.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“There is no true scholar who has not the instincts of a true soldier in his veins. To be able to command and to be able to obey in a proud fashion; to keep one's place in rank and file, and yet to be ready at any moment to lead; to prefer danger to comfort; not to weigh what is permitted and what is forbidden in a tradesman's balance; to be more hostile to pettiness, slyness, and parasitism than to wickedness. What is is that one learns in a hard school? To obey and to command.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“How does one become stronger? By deciding slowly; and by holding firmly to the decision once it is made. Everything else follows of itself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“If you put your mind to something and persevere in an effort to improve, the day will come when it all seems to click, no matter whether that day comes later rather than sooner. As the proverb says, 'Great talents mature late'.”
― Kajiwara Takeo, The Direction of Play

“We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never happen again.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“There is no poststructuralist person - no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in. The result is that much of a person's conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures. Our conceptual systems are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency, even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though historical contingency does matter a great deal. The grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience creates a largely centered self, but not a monolithic self.”
― George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family; our actions can make them happy or sad, healthy or sick, even rich or poor. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely, our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. It is as if we can feel the pulse of the social world around us and respond to its persistent rhythms. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

“If a blind man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that he will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. One must be glad if he sees anything at all, and if he begins to understand what he sees.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

“The projection of one's feeling toward oneself upon a cosmic scale may seem to hinge on a metaphysical premise, but it can be defended empirically. That I am here, now, doing this - that depends on an awe-inspiring series of antecedent events, on millions of seemingly accidental moves and decisions, both by myself and many others whose moves and decisions in turn depended on yet other people. And our very existence, our being as we are, required that our parents had to choose each other, not anyone else, and beget us at the precise moment when we were actually begotten; and the same consideration applies to their parents, and to all our ancestors, going back indefinitely. Thus any affirmation of the present moment points far beyond the present - and it is a significant psychological corollary, on which Nietzsche frequently insists, that those who are dissatisfied with themselves usually project their dissatisfaction upon the world.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

“We do not sufficiently distinguish between individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity rather than to collective consideration and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfillment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to a better social performance than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed. The idiosyncrasy of an individual is not to be understood as any strangeness in his substance or in his components, but rather as a unique combination, or gradual differentiation, of functions and faculties which in themselves are universal. Every human face has a nose, two eyes, etc., but these universal factors are variable, and it is this variability which makes individual peculiarities possible. Individuation, therefore, can only mean a process of psychological development that fulfils the individual qualities given; in other words, it is a process by which a man becomes the definite, unique being he in fact is. In so doing he does not become “selfish” in the ordinary sense of the word, but is merely fulfilling the peculiarity of his nature, and this, as we have said, is vastly different from egotism or individualism.”
― C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

“This—is now my way—where is yours?' thus I answered those who asked me 'the way.' For theway—that does not exist!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact." As an intuitionist, I'd say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It's the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the "delusion" of believing in gods (for the New Atheists). The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery - An Autobiography

“If your moral matrix rests entirely on the Care and Fairness foundations, then it's hard to hear the sacred overtones in America's unofficial motto: E pluribus unum (from many, one). By "sacred", I mean... the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events, with infinite value, particularly those ideas, objects, and events that bind a group together into a single entity. The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“It is a misconception to think of the function or result of machines as primarily one of creating jobs. The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare. It is no trick to employ everybody, even (or especially) in the most primitive economy. Full employment—very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment—is characteristic of precisely the nations that are the most retarded industrially. Where full employment already exists, new machines, inventions and discoveries cannot—until there has been time for an increase in population—bring more employment. They are likely to bring more unemployment (but this time I am speaking of voluntary and not involuntary unemployment) because people can now afford to work fewer hours, while children and the overaged no longer need to work.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

“The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit

“Unconsciously we seek the principles and opinions which are suited to our temperament, so that at last it seems as if these principles and opinions had formed our character and given it support and stability, whereas exactly the contrary has taken place.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Socialism is the fantastic younger brother of almost decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed; its efforts are, therefore, in the deepest sense reactionary. For it desires such an amount of state power as only despotism has possessed— indeed, it outdoes all the past, in that it aims at the complete annihilation of the individual, whom it deems an unauthorised luxury of nature, which is to be improved by it into an appropriate organ of the general community.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air