domingo, 29 de dezembro de 2019

Citações em apneia

"Remember that the world is a very complex place, and in many cases fundamental understanding is only found buried deep under layer after slippery layer of confused searching. Science is a tool, yes, but not a tool for backing you up. It’s not a weapon to wield. It’s a framework for understanding nature, no more, no less."
— Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter, writing in Forbes (December 17, 2018)

"We write or speak good English when, obeying the conventions or principles of modern usage, and paying due respect to the context, we express exactly what we mean."
— G. H. Vallins, Good English (1951), p. 11

"(...) [E]ven though all people are capable of applying their reason and basing their decisions on relational analyses, in practice we don't do this as often as we could. We tend to be guided automatically by the habits, beliefs and values of the cultural environment we live in. To stay alert and rationalise everything that is going on around us is not only very difficult, but even practically impossible."
— Sašo Dolenc, The Genius Who Never Existed (2014), p. 123

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain (pseudónimo de Samuel Langhorne Clemens), frase provavelmente apócrifa, mas sempre com o seu valor intrínseco que nunca é de mais lembrar!

Tira de Manual do Minotauro, por Laerte, de 07/10/2018

"Spinoza speaks for those who believe that happiness and virtue are possible with nothing more than what we have in our hands. Leibniz stands for those convinced that happiness and virtue depend on something that lies beyond. Spinoza counsels calm attention to our own deepest good. Leibniz expresses that irrepressible longing to see our good works reflected back to us in the praise of others. Spinoza affirms the totality of things such as it is. Leibniz is that part of us that ceaselessly strives to make us something more than what we are. Without doubt, there is a little piece of each in everybody; equally certain is the fact that, at times, a choice must be made.
Leibniz (...), with the promise that the cruel surface of experience conceals a most pleasing and beautiful truth, a world in which everything happens for a reason and all is for the best, the glamorous courtier of Hanover made himself into the philosopher of the common man. (...)
Spinoza, on the other hand, was marked from the start as a rara avis. Given his eerie self-sufficiency, his inhuman virtue, and his contempt for the multitudes, it could not have been otherwise. Yet the message of his philosophy is not that we know all that there is to know; but rather that there is nothing that cannot be known. Spinoza’s teaching is that there is no unfathomable mystery in the world; no other-world accessible only through revelation or epiphany; no hidden power capable of judging or affirming us; no secret truth about everything. There is instead only the slow and steady accumulation of many small truths; and the most important of these is that we need expect nothing more in order to find happiness in this world. His is a philosophy for philosophers, who are as uncommon now as they have always been."
— Matthew Steward, The Courtier and the Heretic (2006), p. 226

"O fantasma é um exibicionista póstumo."
— Mario Quintana, Caderno H (1973), p. 67 [editora objetiva, 2013]