Nicolás Boullosa > Nicolás's Quotes

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“That one won’t crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he’s the only one left standing at the end of it.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra A book for all and none

“Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Consider also the revolutionary utopians, who typically achieve only destruction and stagnation. Though they are blind optimists, what defines them as utopians is their pessimism that their supposed utopia, or their violent proposals for achieving and entrenching it, could ever be improved upon. Additionally,”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“SOCRATES: You have? Oh – you said that you honour Athenians for our openness to persuasion. And for our defiance of bullies. But”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Those two overarching concerns are these: we Athenians are concerned above all with improvement; the Spartans seek only – stasis. Two opposite objectives. If”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“SOCRATES: No, I am not sure of anything. I never have been. But the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fallibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes. In”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“The problem with constant becoming (especially in a protopian crawl) is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion. Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect. More”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“Sócrates no encaminó sus miras hacia las fantasías vanas; su fin fue proveernos de preceptos y máximas, que real y conjuntamente sirviesen para el gobierno de nuestra vida;   Observar una regla de conducta, perseverar hacia un fin, seguir la naturaleza.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Ensayos

“Cada uno de nosotros es más rico de lo que piensa, pero se nos habitúa al préstamo y a la mendicidad; se nos acostumbra a servirnos de lo ajeno más que de lo nuestro. En nada acierta el hombre detenerse en el preciso punto de su necesidad: en goces, riqueza y poderío abraza más de lo que puede estrechar; su avidez es incapaz de moderación. Yo”
― Michel de Montaigne, Ensayos

“Estas empanadas de lugares comunes con que tantas personas economizan su estudio, apenas sirven para asuntos comunes, y solo para mostrarnos, no para conducirnos: fruto ridículo de la ciencia, que Sócrates censura tan graciosamente en Eutidemo. Yo”
― Michel de Montaigne, Ensayos

“A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury. In”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“We’ll unbundle books into their constituent bits and pieces and knit those into the web, but the higher-level organization of the book will be the focus for our attention—that remaining scarcity in our economy. A book is an attention unit. A”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future