The Devil -- Ivan's Nightmare

If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen.... I was predestined 'to deny' and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not at all inclined to negation. 'No, you must go and deny, without denial there's no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of criticism?' Without criticism it would be nothing but one 'hosannah.' But nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, the hosannah must be tried in the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style. But I don't meddle in that, I didn't create it, I am not answerable for it. Well, they've chosen their scapegoat, they've made me write the column of criticism and so life was made possible..... I might bawl hosannah, and the indispensable minus would disappear at once, and good sense would reign supreme throughout the whole world. And that, of course, would mean the end of everything, even of magazines and news-papers, for who would take them in? 

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
 

È sempre bene
Il sospettare un poco in questo mondo.

 

Mozart, Cosi fan tutte

I resist what I cannot change
Own it in your own way
I wanna find what can't be found

Pain, The War on Drugs

Every act has consequences that change that world in some way, no matter how modest, and those actions will go on changing the world for millennia after we are gone. But to remember the details of every action is to invite madness, to paralyze our brains and our communities with memory.

Gavin Francis, The Dream of Forgetfulness (NYRB, March 9, 2023)

 

It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.

 
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, as quoted by Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

The more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God

He who knows not what the Universe is knows not what is his place therein. He who knows not for what end it was created, knows not himself and knows not the world. He who is deficient in either of these parts of knowledge cannot even say for what end he himself was created.

 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (VIII,52)

Consider frequently how swiftly things that exist or are coming into existence are swept by and carried away. Their substance is as a river perpetually flowing; their actions are in continual change, and their causes subject to ten thousand alterations. Scarcely anything is stable, and the vast eternities of past and future in which all things are swallowed up are close upon us on both hands. Is he not then a fool who is puffed up with success in the things of this world, or is distracted, or worried, as if he were in a time of trouble likely to endure for long.


Marcus Aurelius, Meditations  (V,23)

There are intelligible principles inherent in the matter of every phenomenon; because matter is essentially the sum of all the seemings that it has for any and all persons. 

Protagoras (the Sophist)

All things must be either limiting, or unlimited, or both limiting and unlimited.  Since things cannot consist either of the limiting alone or of the unlimited alone ... we must obviously conclude that the universe and its contents are fitted together and harmonized by a combination of the limiting and the unlimited.

For if everything that is were unlimited, there would not be anything of such a character that it could be recognized.

Philolaus  (a Pythagorean)

In everything there is a portion of everything else.

Anaxagoras, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.

Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.

Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

To see into thy nature, O Zeus, is baffling to the mind. I have been praying to thee without knowing whether thou art necessity or nature or simply the intelligence of mortals. 

Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics

Reality

"Reality" [is] a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot "wish them away).... [an] order [that] is relative to a particular socio-historical situation [but] appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

Emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence.

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem 

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

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

The same sun shines on everyone and everything, each place is as real as the next.


From an afternoon in Swaziland