Gonçalo Peres

“It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself . . . . And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.

The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world—e.g. picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“As várias formas hodiernas de dissolução do matrimónio, como as uniões livres e o "matrimónio de prova", até ao pseudomatrimónio entre pessoas do mesmo sexo, são, pelo contrário, expressões de uma liberdade anárquica que se faz passar indevidamente por verdadeira libertação do homem. Uma tal pseudoliberdade funda-se numa banalização do corpo que inevitavelmente inclui a banalização do homem. O seu pressuposto é que o homem pode fazer de si o que quer: o seu corpo torna-se assim numa coisa secundária, manipulável sob o ponto de vista humano, a ser utilizado como se deseja. O libertinismo, que se faz passar por descoberta do corpo e do seu valor, é na realidade um dualismo que torna o corpo desprezível, colocando-o por assim dizer fora do ser autêntico e da dignidade da pessoa.”
― Bento XVI