#phil

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#science #search-for-meaning #science

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. ↗

— René Descartes

#logic #metaphysics #ontology #philosophy #psychology

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#philosophy #science #science

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#science #science

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary. ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#physics #science

The time to make up your mind about people, is never. ↗

— Philip Barry

#tracy-lord #acting

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#action

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously ↗

— Confucius

#harmony

A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character… ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#liberty #philosophy #nature

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard. ↗

— George Santayana

#philosophy #poetry #music