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'Tant de fois, au cours de ma vie, la réalité m'avait déçu parce que au moment
où je la percevais, mon imagination qui était mon seul organe pour jouir de la
beauté, ne pouvait s'appliquer à elle en vertu de la loi inévitable qui veut
qu'on ne puisse imaginer que ce qui est absent. Et voici que soudain l'effet de
cette dure loi, s'était trouvé neutralisé, suspendu, par un expédient
merveilleux de la nature, qui avait fait miroiter une sensation - bruit de la
fourchette et du marteau,...
'Et ils garnissent les murs comme des mouches, jusqu'au plus fond. Et je
vois ces centaines de visages blancs. L'homme s'ennuie, et l'ignorance
lui est attachée depuis sa naissance. Et ne sachant de rien comment cela commence ou finit, c'est pour cela qu'il va au théâtre. Et il se regarde lui-même, les mains posées sur les genoux. Et il pleure et il rit, et il n'a point envie de s'en aller.'
'The compatibilists' main adversaries are incompatibilists,
who deny the compatibility of free will and determinism. Some
incompatibilists remain agnostic as to whether persons have free will.
But most take a further stand regarding the reality or unreality of
free will. Some of these incompatibilists, libertarians, hold
that at least some persons have free will and that, therefore,
determinism is false. Other incompatibilists, hard
determinists, have a less optimistic view, holding that
determinism is true and that no persons have free will. In recent
times, hard determinism has fallen out of fashion, largely because our
best sciences suggest that determinism is false. But the spirit of
the hard determinist position is sustained by hard
incompatibilists, who hold that there is no free will if
determinism is true, but also, that there is no free will if
determinism is false.'
...'Perhaps reading Dickens’s novels quietly alone doesn’t have this
immediate effect, but great writing initiates a real relationship that
urges us to think and feel as the author does. It is in this sense that
it can indeed do harm.'
'Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the
little glass table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she
said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and
unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to
work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her
pocked) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the
little passage: and THEN-she found herself at last in the
beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the coolfountains.'
'Powerful ideas emerge from particular places— places both
figurative and literal. Figuratively, people need to find common ground
before they can come together to find new solutions to difficult
problems. Literally—well, some places just seem to provide inspiration.
They attract creative people who feel more productive and more open to
new possibilities when they are there and, as a result, innovation
happens. '
The uncertainty principle simply says that for some pairs of questions
to the oddsmaker, the answers may be interrelated. Famously, the answer
to the question of a particle’s position is constrained by the answer to
the question of its velocity, and vice versa. In particular, if we have
a huge ensemble of systems each prepared in the same quantum state, the
more the position is narrowed down, the less the velocity is, and vice
versa.
'I think the beginnings of an answer may be found in Aristotle’s notion
of “formation.” To wrestle with basic questions about the nature of
ourselves or the world we inhabit or the interface between the two or
how creatures such as we should behave in such a world forms us in some
way. '
