There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)

Retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for.  Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michel de Montaigne 

For Kevin

Death wipes everything away
Except for the living.
We are each a world.
And all there will ever be.


Caught in the ether.  

We're an information economy.... it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.  Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

William Gibson,  Johnny Mnemonic

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

Michel de Montaigne 

Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Natural Teleology

Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos


See also:  http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2018/01/if-there-was-cosmological-design-what.html
 

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.

Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 

Philip Larkin, The Old Fools

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.
 

Michel de Montaigne 

The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little.

Michel de Montaigne

A man may say too much even upon the best subjects.

Michel de Montaigne

So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own.

Michel de Montaigne

   

The disdain that so many people feel [millennials] reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s lives. (It does not seem coincidental that young people would be criticized for being entitled at a time when people are being stripped of their entitlements.) Millennials, in other words, have adjusted too well to the world they grew up in; their perfect synchronization with economic and cultural disruption has been mistaken for the source of the disruption itself.

Jia Tolentino, "Where Millennials Come From" (The New Yorker, December 4, 2017)

Now is now!  There is never more to experience than this single "now", which recurs at an interval exactly one second in length.

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth


 See also:   http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2013/09/moments-in-time-and-consciousness.html

In truth, knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment; the last may make shift without the other, but the other never without this.

Michel de Montaigne