Annotated quotes
Here is a selection of quotes I have gathered over the course of my readings. Regrettably, when I started to note them town I didn’t acquire the habit of recording precise references, so I must content myself with noting the author’s name alone. Refresh the page to access the latest version.
In creation process
"Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, for it leaves behind a gaping void, much like the one the Spirit left when it abandoned this cursed world. By their very nature, these god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as what was lost. The choice of that something—if indeed it is a choice—governs the destiny of men." (Dear reader, how have you filled that void? Think about it.)
"Action must be subjected to the test of thought, and thought to the test of action." (Break the dichotomy between theory and practice, action and reflection, for they enrich one another to such an extent that the boundary between them is often arbitrary, if not outright harmful.)
"The way science works is frightening. Just think about it for a moment: the most creative and the most destructive of man’s inventions (the computer and the atomic bomb) were born at exactly the same time. A large part of the high-tech world we live in today—with its space conquest and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine—was born from the impulse of a single man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic calculators to determine whether an H-bomb could be built." (The idea that science/technical progress is an as apocalyptic as salvific; but above all untameable.
"At birth, the cortex resembles a forest after a hurricane has passed through—bare, with only a few stripped-down trunks left standing. In the first six months of life, the true springtime of the brain, branches and offshoots multiply until they form an inextricable thicket." (A beautiful analogy that brings a touch of poetry to the cold complexity of our brain structures. It evokes the sense of a miniature sub-universe within our heads—one that humankind has yet to conquer.)
"Before educating the child, let us observe them!" (Just because we were once children ourselves does not mean we truly know how to put ourselves in their place. Let us observe them before presuming to teach them anything, rather than confining them to the abstract, impersonal, and dehumanizing category of “child.” This is the shift Claparède introduced in his pedagogy.)
"To deal with how to raise and educate children seems to be the most important and the most difficult task in all of human science." (Who would dare to claim having more than a marginal influence on the development of their own child?)
Whoever it is you're looking at, know that they have already walked through hell more than once. (Living by this maxim allows us to bring empathy even toward everybody we might encounter.)
"He who has reached his goal has missed everything else." (One must explore an entire space of possibilities to truly grasp whether their choice is the right one—or to unearth the reasons why one theory may be more fitting than another.) In the same vibe : « An expert is someone that made all the mistakes that can be possibly made in a narrow field. »
"Nothing is born of diamonds. Flowers are born of manure." (The idea that our sorrows are deeply fertile. If we know how to extract their energy, they become the main source of beautiful metamorphoses.)
"The art of paying attention, which is the great art, presupposes the art of not paying attention, which is the Royal art." (In this modern jungle of external stimuli, the best tool we can possess is mastery over our attention—which ultimately defines who we are and what we become.)
"I write because I feel that, in the slow process of falling out of love with my past lovers, the methodical dissection of the moments we shared played a crucial role. Once the affair was laid bare before me, with all its crude bolts exposing the smallness of the story, I could finally lose interest." (Strangely, after romantic failure, we feel a pressing need to destroy the value of what we once shared with the other. As if we needed to regain control, burn and rewrite the book of our common history so that the future 'us' might forget the uniqueness of what has been lost.)
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” (And indeed, without actively working with the unconscious, one lives almost entirely as a slave—without even realizing it. The effort to read and understand the unconscious grants at least a marginal increase in freedom of action.) “What you deny subdues you; what you accept transforms you.”
“Consciousness reigns but does not govern.” (The day I dared to ask myself, “Where do my thoughts, my emotions, my impulses really come from?” I realized the only honest answer was: from a realm with of me, yet beyond every possible control. That was my first encounter with my unconscious. Since then, I carefully record what it whispers or shows to me. Do the same, if you can—it is an inexhaustible source of self-discoveries.)
“To speak a word is like striking a key on the piano of the imagination.” (The conscious part, with the little influence it has, only throws stones into the pond of the unconscious, where the unconscious is the propagating wave arising from it.)
“Falling in love is the most beautiful pathological moment of a normal human being.”
“Every passion eventually seeks its audience.” (Whenever I notice myself behaving differently simply because I know I’m being watched, this quote comes to my mind—and reminds me of the comical streak that dwells in every human.)
“Love is the engine of the world; money its fuel.” (Strip away all layers of culture, politics, business—and what remains are the most essential needs, of which love plays a central a part.)
“Without knowing why, I love this world where we come to die.” (Indeed—who ever asked to be born? And yet, here we are, in this world where death awaits. But who’s to say it isn’t a magnificent place to build a beautiful death?)
“There are two processes a human being cannot stop as long as they live: breathing and thinking. In truth, we can hold our breath longer than we can stop our thoughts. And this inability to stop thinking—to cease thought—is a terrifying constraint.”(It is this constraint that makes small mental habits like - the ability to question the causes in all things, to raise moments of happiness to oneself, to live in gratitude - that when practiced as a reflex, generate considerable changes in an individual over the long run.)
“Are mind and body separate? And if so, which one should we choose?” (A sharp, ironic jab to offer any die-hard dualist unwilling to see their “pure soul” tainted by the filth of matter.)
“Too much animality disfigures the civilized man; too much civilization creates sick animals. (…) Erotic life blossoms only when mind and instinct find joyful concord.” In a similar direction : “Wisdom has its excesses and needs moderation no less than madness.” (We should stop taking ourselves so seriously. Never forget: we are also animals—raw, untamed, and brutal. To deny that is already to lose ourselves.)
“Encounters give birth to ideas, to projects, and to men.” (When I look back on what has changed me most, it is invariably the people I’ve met. I send you here a little more gratitude.)
“But if you do not give up, what you can achieve with your intuition will far exceed even your most unrealistic expectations.” (David Bessis made me realize the powers we can harness within our cognitive processes. Our brain is perhaps more powerful than nature itself could have anticipated.)
“The paradox of the human condition is that we can become ourselves only through the influence of others.”
“People will forget what you said, forget what you did—but they will never forget how you made them feel.” (This is easily verified in one’s own life, especially since the unconscious—which absorbs most of the information from an encounter—speaks only in symbols and emotions, and knows no formal language.)
“Man thirsts for truth, but is it the water source he seeks—or the trough?” (There are two kinds of people in the pursuit of knowledge: those who seek truths handed down by authority (the trough), and those who seek causes in all things (the water source). I would even add that the real geniuses are those who have generated sources (which would represent new fertile concepts or ways of questioning).
“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning; not possession, but acquisition that brings us the greatest pleasure.” (The foundation of any life oriented toward knowledge. The joy lies in questioning and discovering—not in hoarding facts. It's the difference between the poet and the typist.)
“To guess at the existence or properties of objects beyond our knowledge, to explain the visible complex by the invisible simple—this is the kind of intuitive intelligence that gave us atomism, thanks to men like Dalton and Boltzmann.” (It is striking how science, in seeking the unimaginable, ends up describing objects whose philosophical essence is beautifully simple—especially in physics where laws are formulated in the mathematical language who himself emerge from minimal, yet very elegant axioms and definition)
“A river may not be vast, but to one who’s never seen a greater, it appears immense. So too with trees, men, and all things—the largest we have seen, we call enormous.” (This is a bias we encounter when considering history. Since we have not yet seen the entire unfolding of human history, it is impossible for us to practice historical relativism. We believe that the Second World War is the most horrible war that has ever happened to humanity - it is the greatest mountain that has ever been seen in the words of Lucretius - but that does not prevent this war from appearing laughable in view of the future cataclysms that may await us around the corner.)
“Seek simplicity but distrust it. ” (Beware of elegant phrases. They are seductive, but often misleading. When a writer delivers rigorous content in an overly poetic form, they may enchant more than they enlighten.)
“No one is exempt from saying stupid things. The misfortune is to say it seriously.”
“The greatness of a profession may lie, above all, in its power to unite people. There is only one true luxury: that of human connection.”
“It is wise, in order to avoid lawsuits, to do everything we can—and perhaps a bit more. It is not only honorable, but sometimes advantageous to forgo part of one's rights.” (It is better to endure a small injustice than to waste time and energy in a useless fight. Like the similar idea that we don't win a war by winning every single battle.)
“Natural selection works silently and without noise, everywhere and whenever the opportunity arises.” (I love when abstract concepts, unreal in themselves, permeate reality in an overarching way—like emergent properties. Natural selection is everywhere and nowhere embodied, yet ever present.)
“Our chief talent is to apply ourselves to varied tasks. To cling to a single mode of being is to exist—not to live. The finest souls are those with the greatest variety and flexibility.” (And that is how I chose to orient my life.)
“I wish that, at such an age, we might leave life as we would a banquet: thanking the host, and packing our bags.” (Another beautiful, untragic approach to death.)