Archive for the ‘quote of the x’ Category
- By Scott Berkun on March 19th, 2010
- 5 Comments »
- philosophy
quote of the week
Couldn’t sleep the other night and watched Examined Life, a film about philosophy. Half of the philosophers interviewed in the film were predictably obtuse and stiff as philosophers often are, but the other half all said things that shook me up and rattled my mind.
I’d heard of Cornell West before, but honestly didn’t think much of him from the sound bytes I’d seen (and his involvement with the philosophically muddy Matrix trilogy). But he offered this impromptu monologue in the back seat of a cab and it blew me away. Not just for his eloquence and presence, but for how easy it was for him to clearly make complex points:
It takes tremendous discipline, tremendous courage to think for yourself. W.B. Yeats said ‘It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.’ Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for an human being. Courage to think. Courage to love. Courage to hope.
[I think of] truth as a way of life, as opposed to a set of propositions that correspond to things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth (capital T), we might have access to truth (little t), but they are fallible claims about truth and they could be wrong, and open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many existential thinkers whether they be religious or secular… have worked to accent our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality and truth about things. And therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is you’re gonna talk about what are the ways I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a journey, a path, toward truth? The way to truth? The truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth.
And scientists can talk about this in terms of producing evidence or reliable conclusions. Religious folks can talk about this in terms of surrendering ones arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you, but they’re all ways of acknowledging our finitude. Our fallibility.
- By Scott Berkun on March 11th, 2010
- 2 Comments »
- quote of the x
Quote of the week
“After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil – everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self – your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’ve never more alive then when you’re almost dead.
You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
From The Things They Carried, By Tim O’Brien
- By Scott Berkun on February 26th, 2010
- 3 Comments »
- philosophy
Quote of the Month
Stephen Fry: If an alien was looking down on us and inspecting our language they would see the worst things we do on this planet is we torture, we kill, we abuse, we harm people, we’re cruel, and those are the things of which we should be ashamed.
Among the best things we do is we breed children, we raise them, we make love to each other, we adore each other, we are affectionate and fond of each other.
How odd the language for the awful things is used casually all the time, ‘oh the traffic was agony’,'it was hell’, ‘it was cruel’, ‘it was torture waiting in line’ You use words like torture? That’s the worst word.
Yet if you use the F word, which is the word for generating the species, for showing physical affection to one another, then we’re taken off the air and accused of being wicked,and irresponsible and a bad influence to children.
Now we’re part of this culture so we often don’t question it, but if you think of someone from outside… it is very strange.
Craig Ferguson: We are very weird fuckers indeed.
From the most excellent late show with Craig Ferguson (youtube).
- By Scott Berkun on January 18th, 2010
- 2 Comments »
- quote of the x
Quote of the month
“You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.”
- William Least Heat-Moon, From Blue Highways
- By Scott Berkun on December 19th, 2009
- 7 Comments »
- quote of the x
Quote of the month
I have a huge quote file I’ve been keeping since 1990, and it’s about 300 single spaced pages of quotes I’ve collected over the years. I think the practice of typing these things in is good for writing. Unable to sleep tonight I stumbled through the file, and found this one.
In the old testament and in the Jewish Interpretive and mystical texts, there is an emphasis on the importance of the spoken word. Speaking is the cause, not the antithesis, of an event or action. The words of the prophet are true because they are spoken, not the reverse. Prophecy is not witchcraft; it does not foretell the future but creates it.
- Reesa Grushka
The curious thing about my affinity for this quote, and my last book, is I’m a big believer in the notion talk is cheap. It is. But talk can, at times, have great power.
Saying things out loud, even if only to yourself, changes how you think and feel about whatever it is you choose to say. On the first day someone speaks the truth about something everyone else has been too afraid to say, or admit to themselves, the world changes forever. Telling someone you love them for the first time, or that they’ve hurt your feelings, or a thousand other scary things can take more courage than any amount of action.
- By Scott Berkun on August 14th, 2009
- 5 Comments »
- philosophy
Quote of the Month: Use the difficulty
“I was rehearsing a play, and there was a scene that went on before me, then I had to come in the door. They rehearsed the scene, and one of the actors had thrown a chair at the other one. It landed right in front of the door where I came in. I opened the door and then rather lamely, I said to the producer who was sitting out in the stalls,’Well, look, I can’t get in. There’s a chair in my way.’ He said,’Well, use the difficulty.’ So I said ‘What do you mean, use the difficulty?’ He said ‘Well, if it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it. If it’s a comedy, fall over it.’ This was a line for me for life: Always use the difficulty.”
Michael Caine, interviewed by NPR’s Terry Gross, from her book All I did was ask
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