#nature

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest. What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude. ↗

— Peter Hoeg

#infinity #solitude #nature

Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him. ↗

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

#obedience #power #nature

As recently as 1950, the Scottish pathologist John Glaister included in his text the tale of a man "who was apprehended after having been seen to have unnatural intercourse with a duck," leaving us to wonder precisely what natural intercourse with a duck would involve. ↗

— E.J. Wagner

#nature

Creative Endeavors are by their nature uncertain. ↗

— Robert Greene

#nature

Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue. ↗

— William Voegeli

#moral-psychology #poverty #nature

In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#science #spirituality #nature

In classes, the more lively and uninhibited ones will “suck away the air” from those with a more passive nature, despite all the efforts of the teacher. It is also a special danger in large groups that you will hear your fellow students’ bad pronunciation more than the teacher’s perfected speech. ↗

— Kató Lomb

#nature

狼心哪有人心毒啊。 。 。 ↗

— Jiang Rong

#poison #wolves #nature

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#looks #people #true-nature #nature

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of man. ↗

— Richard M. Weaver

#truth #word-of-god #nature