#vs

I know that my youth will triumph over everything - every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't... ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#karamazov-bothers #life

Don’t say bad words; don’t interrupt people; don’t shove; don’t steal; don’t lie. To the child, all these prohibitions appear identical (“It’s not nice”). The distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic will come only later, and gradually. Politeness thus precedes morality, or rather, morality at first is nothing more than politeness: a compliance with usage and its established rules, with the normative play of appearances—a compliance with the world and the ways of the world. ↗

— André Comte-Sponville

#life

Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#the- #love

Por que ele... Não será você? Por que não é como você? Ele vale menos, e, entretanto, gosto mais dele do que de você. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#love #white-nights #why #love

He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves? ↗

— Henry James

#art

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there. ↗

— Lev Grossman

#theology #art

Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#nature

There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#magic #magic-vs-nature #magic-vs-science #nature #power

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#notes-from-underground #nature

What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic? ↗

— Steven Novella

#science #science-vs-religion #skeptics-guide-to-the-universe #nature