Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.


“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely his was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be a true philosopher, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”
― Moby Dick
― Moby Dick

“Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Jaidev’s 2024 Year in Books
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