#so

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught? ↗

— Robert J. Sawyer

#darwinism #evolution #infidelity #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Einstein, stop telling God what to do. ↗

— Niels Bohr

#laws-of-physics #sovereignty-of-god #nature

Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#lyrics #music #soul #art

When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough. ↗

— Hediger

#philosophy #thought #nature

But in the divine nature Persons three, And in one person the divine and human. ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#nature

Her life had been too safe to need courage, and too easy to develop resolve. ↗

— Stephen T. Harper

#fantastic-prose #just-plain-wow-writing #courage

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature. ↗

— Lin Yutang

#human-nature #logic #philosophy #reason #nature

Do mesmo modo que o papel-moeda circula no lugar da prata, também no mundo, no lugar da estima verdadeira e da amizade autêntica, circulam as suas demonstrações exteriores e os seus gestos imitados do modo mais natural possível. Por outro lado, poder-se-ia perguntar se há pessoas que de facto merecem essa estima e essa amizade. Em todo o caso, dou mais valor aos abanos de cauda de um cão leal do que a cem daquelas demonstações e gestos. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#animais #cão #pessoas #nature

Now I'm seen by more people in one episode than I was in 20 years of theatre and movies. It's gratifying to have an impact on 25 million people a night, but I can say goodbye to my lunch-pail life as a working actor. I'm scared I might be a celebrity. ↗

— William Petersen

#celebrity #episode #goodbye #gratifying #i

Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive. ↗

— Frederick Turner

#nature #western-philosophy #nature