I wanted all things to make sense,
So we'd be happy instead of tense.

 From Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Ambrosia

 

Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind…. dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion. 

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

The nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. 

Greg Bear, Eons

All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. 

Greg Bear,  Legacy

We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 

Knowledge is a pile of bricks, and understanding is a way of building.

Theodore  Sturgeon

Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;  It thinks it discovers at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with the motion.

Montaigne

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)

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)

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments.
 
The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory. 

Montaigne

Man is a small kosmos.

Democritus, (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

Solitude seems to me to wear the best favor in such as have already employed their most active and flourishing age in the world's service…. We have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and repose…. We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. 'Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow. Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and concentrate them in and for ourselves. He that can cast off within himself and resolve the offices of friendship and company, let him do it. In this decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome, and importunate to others, let him take care not to be useless, burdensome, and importunate to himself. Let him soothe and caress himself, and above all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their presence.... The stoutest and most resolute natures render even their seclusion glorious and exemplary.

Michel de Montaigne

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

The only remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils by which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously and promptly.

 Michel de Montaigne

It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.

 Thucydides (Book Four), The History of the Peloponnesian War

The early [Greek] philosophers were concerned with understanding the nature of the cosmos.... They appear to have shared a belief that the world system, the kosmos, was subject to a divine force which gave it an underlying and orderly background. Where they got this idea, which is a far cry from the Homeric world of gods, is unknown – possibly from eastern mythology. It proved fundamental to the speculations which followed.

Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The entitlement to believe what on careful reflection seems to be the case, where there is no reason to doubt it, is the necessary condition for being able to form any justified beliefs at all. ... The only way to pursue the truth is to consider what seems true, after careful reflection of a kind appropriate to the subject matter, in light of all the relevant data, principles, and circumstances.


Thomas Nagel, Listening to Reason (New York Review, October 9, 2014)

For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same.... such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric.  However, this did not stop him making them.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance