#the

Mother (fragment) ...You asked me if I would be sad when it happened and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner, as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever. ↗

— Ted Kooser

#mothers-and-daughters #nature #poetry #life

Master the rules of the game until you can play it better they can. ↗

— Michael Scott

#lesson #life #michael-scott #niccolo-machiavelli #the-sorceress

Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people's head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing. ↗

— Lynda Barry

#school-clothes #skull-heads #life

They were all intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law. Yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-Swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#life

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace. ↗

— Dani Shapiro

#life

Ahhh! The Sky, Heaven and Hell..Those three words were known in the East..Once you take them out of our earthly world, the whole world will fall apart..all the masterpieces we have made would sound and look platitude. I know the West now is an object of admiration for its science and discoveries but what does it worth judging by the greatest discoveries that were found in the east?! Verily the West is exploring the Earth and the East is exploring the Sky. ↗

— Tawfik Al-Hakim

#science

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive. ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#metaphilosophy #philosophy #science #the-blue-book #wittgenstein

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive. ↗

— Adolfo Bioy Casares

#science #the-body #science

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language. ↗

— James K.A. Smith

#discipline #postmodernism #proof #religious-claims #revelation

Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing). ↗

— Bill Gaede

#extinction #gaede #hypothesis #knowledge #prediction