Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

In our wandering expeditions of the imagination, we often scare up game that methodical philosophy can make use of in its well-ordered household

In our wandering expeditions of the imagination, we often scare up game that methodical philosophy can make use of in its well-ordered household

Has anyone ever investigated why the noses of healthy dogs are so wet? The intention could easily be that many odors are more easily precipitated upon it.

[there is] the suspicion that Lichtenberg¡¯s fragmentary philosophy is of a kind similar to that of Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. For my part I think that anyone who conscientiously seeks ¡°Lichtenberg¡¯s philosophy¡± in the Sudelb¨¹cher is not exactly wasting his time¡ªno one who reads Lichtenberg conscientiously is wasting his time¡ªbut is certainly expending ingenuity in the wrong place: the analogy with Nietzsche or Wittgenstein is misleading, inasmuch as their thinking is only expressed in fragmentary form whereas Lichtenberg¡¯s really is fragmentary.

A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect. Others can perhaps do it just as well as you can. Only they do not make a business of it, because it seems to them silly to publicize such things.


If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called 'Damn It'.


We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.


Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.


Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older


To err is human also insofar as animals seldom orn ever err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so


There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.


Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.


You can take the first book you lay your hands on and with your eyes closed point to any line and say: A book could be written about this. When you open your eyes, you will seldom find you are deceived.


That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.


The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

If I had not written this book then a thousand years hence between six and seven in the evening people would in many a town in Germany be talking about quite different things...

Why put up with whatever random shuffle

Why put up with whatever random shuffle I got dealt at birth?

Delia blocked out the sound of the searchers and rose up over the tableau, skimming through the air above her past morphotypes, seeking the path to erasure. But as she left the cats and cockroaches and lizards behind, new forms emerged from the darkness, new bodies she was sure she had never inhabited. She flew on ever faster, impatient to be done with it, but the shapes kept coming in an endless cavalcade: taller, toothier, plumper, sleeker, many-limbed, furred, naked, feathered. The sculptures weren't decaying toward the simplicity she sought; the further she went, the more baroque the gargoyles beneath here became.

Why put up with whatever random shuffle

Why put up with whatever random shuffle I got dealt at birth?

Delia blocked out the sound of the searchers and rose up over the tableau, skimming through the air above her past morphotypes, seeking the path to erasure. But as she left the cats and cockroaches and lizards behind, new forms emerged from the darkness, new bodies she was sure she had never inhabited. She flew on ever faster, impatient to be done with it, but the shapes kept coming in an endless cavalcade: taller, toothier, plumper, sleeker, many-limbed, furred, naked, feathered. The sculptures weren't decaying toward the simplicity she sought; the further she went, the more baroque the gargoyles beneath here became.

I¡¯m thinking about something much more important than bombs, my dear. I¡¯m thinking about computers...

I remember him there, standing silent within the computation, staring at the lights flashing in front of his eyes. One machine thinking inside of

I¡¯m thinking about something much more important than bombs, my dear. I¡¯m thinking about computers...

I remember him there, standing silent within the computation, staring at the lights flashing in front of his eyes. One machine thinking inside of another... He left us a part of his mind.

He felt lonely even among the people he loved. Because of that, I could understand the strange kinship he felt toward computers

His mind was in a state of constant hunger... Spiritually, he was an ignoramus, yes, but he did have unquestionable faith in logic. Ah, but that type of faith is always dangerous! Especially if it is later betrayed. Nothing should be beyond question... Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole... once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free...

it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn¡¯t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself ¡ª six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Many people still believe that Mutually Assured Destruction helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot

I asked him, point-blank, why he felt that he needed to stay in Europe and to travel so often to Germany. He was so close, he said, so close to the foundations of mathematics that he could feel a tingle in his brain! That month, the Nazis had become the second-strongest political force in Germany, and Jancsi¡¯s wife, Mariette, kept nagging me to convince him to stop traveling there, to stay with her in Hungary. It was pointless, really, we both knew how stubborn he was, so I did not even try... Jancsi was obsessed with history¡ªespecially with the fall of ancient empires¡ªand though his hatred for the Nazis was essentially boundless, he was also convinced that he would know exactly when to leave. I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man.

He once spent half an hour explaining the many advantages of having a small Pekinese versus a Great Dane, and he was still going on about it when I got up and left. This, from the same person who made countless contributions to group, ergodic, and operator theory, and published thirty-two major papers in less than three years

America altered something inside him, it triggered a chemical or electrical rewiring of his brain... Not a breath of culture to be found in that entire country.

peeking underneath the desks of the secretaries at the institute. Some of those poor women had to stick pieces of cardboard there, just so that this great man, this ?bermensch, would stop staring up their skirts

He suffered from the loss of his mind more than I have seen any human being suffer, in any other circumstance

the slow and constant advance of his mental disorder, which seemed, like the entropy of the universe he had so wonderfully captured in [Boltzmann's] equation, to be constantly and irreversibly increasing, leading to inevitable randomness and decay. He admitted to his colleagues that he lived in perpetual fear that he might suddenly lose his mind during a lecture. Toward the end of his life he could hardly breathe from his asthma, his eyesight dimmed to the point where he could no longer read, and his headaches and migraines became so utterly unbearable that his physician ordered him to completely abstain from any scientific activity. In September 1906, Boltzmann hanged himself with a short rope from the crossbars of the window

"[mathematics] kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn¡¯t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels"

To acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational, to recognize disharmony, would place the fabric of existence at risk, since not just our reality, but every single aspect of the universe ¡ª whether physical, mental, or ethereal ¡ª depended on the unseen threads that bind all things together... it would be a death blow to science, philosophy, and rationality

[Ehrenfest] knew of no way to keep [his son] safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind¡¯s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science... Paul sensed its budding influence, could hear the faint stirring of its tendrils as it slowly crawled toward us, and yet he could not name or place it, and hardly dared to speak of it out loud, for how could he tell if this morbid imagining, this inexplicable bane that he felt it was his duty to arrest, was the fruit of genuine foresight, or just another malignant growth of the delusion that was slowly overcoming his mind

[a point in] history when our relationship with technology will be fundamentally altered, as the creatures of our imagination slowly begin to take real form, and we are faced with the responsibility to not only create but also care for them.