#err

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#brain #conjecture #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. ↗

— Anais Nin

#error #giving #i #living #losing

...the winter is kind and leaves red berries on the boughs for hungry sparrows... ↗

— John Geddes

#boughs #food #nature #poetry #sparrows

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#trial-and-error #trying #perseverance

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent. ↗

— Susanna Kaysen

#survival #susanna-kaysen #talent #talent

The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words "going along". We simply go along with the values and practices of society. ↗

— Jerry Bridges

#respectable-sins #worldliness #life

We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I want to look." What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. "Our bodies won't have secrets now," I said as I took my turn and sat down. He had hopped into the bathtub and was just about to turn on the shower. "I want you to see mine," I said. He did more. He stepped out, kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his hand, watched the whole thing happen. ↗

— André Aciman

#scatological #terrible #life

Love this quote when the Argeneau boys all go to find their mum without their life mates, and Margurite questions them about how unhappy they will be about it. Vincent says, "She'll have a fit, throw a tantrum, i'll grovel a bit, and we'll have make-up sex". Now ain't that just typical blokes, although it often works in our favour eh girls when they wanna get back in good books LOL! ↗

— Lynsey Sands

#life

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#error #life #past #virtue #life

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins. ↗

— A.C. Grayling

#eagleton-terry #ideology #marxism #life