#nit

Thinking is the most overrated human activity. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#humor #thought #humor

There's a fine mascara line between genius and insanity ↗

— Josh Stern

#humor

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture! ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#fight #furniture #humor #violence #humor

Consider yourself. I want you to imagine a scene from your childhood. Pick something evocative... Something you can remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you WEREN'T there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over... The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, whilse simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. ↗

— Steve Grand

#clouds #cognition #flux #life #matter

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#insightful #space-exploration #the-future #imagination

God's ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine. ↗

— Rachel Held Evans

#compassion #god #imagination

What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#existence #existentialism #god #humanity #imperfection

The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#infinity #imagination

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#insanity #logic-reason #poets #imagination

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#myth #imagination