Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“The distinction was nicely drawn by a study in which both men and women were asked about the minimal level of intelligence they would accept in a person they were “dating.â€� The average response, for both male and female, was: average intelligence. They were also asked how smart a person would have to be before they would consent to sexual relations. The women said: Oh, in that case, markedly above average. The men said: Oh, in that case, markedly below average.”
― Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

“We overschedule our days and complain constantly about being too busy; we shop endlessly for stuff we don’t need and then feel oppressed by the clutter that surrounds us; we rarely sleep well or enough; we compare our bodies to the artificial ones we see in magazines and our lives to the exaggerated ones we see on television; we watch cooking shows and then eat fast food; we worry ourselves sick and join gyms we don’t visit; we keep up with hundreds of acquaintances but rarely see our best friends; we bombard ourselves with video clips and emails and instant messages; we even interrupt our interruptions.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“When it comes time for us to decide what we should buy and how we should spend our free time, we expect ever more choice. And in order to try to make our way through all of the options we’ve created for ourselves, we’ve turned the whole world into an endless catalog of “picks and pans,â€� in which anything that isn’t deemed to be mind-blowing is regarded as useless. We no longer damn things with faint praise—we damn them with any praise that is less than ecstatic. Loving or loathing are the defaults—five stars or one.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“When we ask one another “What are you reading?â€� sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. “What are you reading?â€� isn’t a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it’s really a way of asking, “Who are you now and who are you becoming?”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler’s window.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“questing is more important than finding, and a journey is more important than the mere arrival at a destination”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“He longed for a minute that didn’t matter: perhaps for time to take a nap or watch something silly on television without feeling guilt or regret. He needed relief from the feeling that he was wasting precious time, not the added pressure of life’s greatest to-do list. I now realize that humans require down time. Quiet time is necessary to process all that happens to us on a daily basis—let alone over the course of a life.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years, initially giving birth to the concept and continuing to enrich it over the course of our lifetime.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years, initially giving birth to the concept and continuing to enrich it over the course of our lifetime. Furthermore, at every moment of our lives, our concepts are selectively triggered by analogies that our brain makes without letup, in an effort to make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Every act is unique, and yet there are resemblances between certain acts, and it is precisely these resemblances that give a language the opportunity to describe them all by the same label; and when a language chooses to do so, that fact creates “familiesâ€� of actions. This is a subtle challenge to which every language reacts in its own fashion, but once this has been done, each group of people who share a common native language accepts as completely natural and self-evident the specific breakdown of concepts handed to them by their language. On the other hand, the conceptual distinctions that are part and parcel of other languages may strike them as artificial, pointlessly finicky, even incomprehensible or stupid, unless they find some interest in the subtleties of such distinctions, which may then make them see their own set of concepts in a fresh light.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Categorization thus helps one to draw conclusions and to guess about how a situation is likely to evolve.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“In short, nonstop categorization is every bit as indispensable to our survival in the world as is the nonstop beating of our hearts. Without the ceaseless pulsating heartbeat of our “categorization engineâ€�, we would understand nothing around us, could not reason in any form whatever, could not communicate with anyone else, and would have no basis on which to take any action.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“If categorization is central to thinking, then what mechanism carries it out? Analogy is the answer.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Indeed, the central thesis of our book â€� a simple yet nonstandard idea â€� is that the spotting of analogies pervades every moment of our thought, thus constituting thought’s core.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“We claim that cognition takes place thanks to a constant flow of categorizations, and that at the base of it all is found, in contrast to classification (which aims to put all things into fixed and rigid mental boxes), the phenomenon of categorization through analogy-making, which endows human thinking with its remarkable fluidity.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Such concepts, be they concrete or abstract, are selectively mobilized instant by instant, and nearly always without any awareness on our part, and it is this ceaseless activity that allows us to build up mental representations of situations we are in, to have complex feelings about them, and to have run-of-the-mill as well as more exalted thoughts. No thought can be formed that isn’t informed by the past; or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Thus our categories keep us well informed at all times, allowing us to bypass the need for direct observation. If we didn’t constantly extrapolate our knowledge into new situations â€� if we refrained from making inferences â€� then we would be conceptually blind. We would be unable to think or act, doomed to permanent uncertainty and to eternal groping in the dark. In short, in order to perceive the world around us, we depend just as much on categorization through analogy as we do on our eyes or our ears.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“For Kant, analogy was the wellspring of all creativity, and Nietzsche gave a famous definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphorsâ€�.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Usually one is unaware of these category shifts because one is mentally immersed in a specific context and such shifts are carried out in a totally unconscious manner. In a given context, just one categorization seems possible to most people. Their lack of awareness of the contextual blinders that they are wearing reinforces the widespread belief in a world in which every object belongs to one and only one Platonic category â€� its “trueâ€� category.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Our intense human desire to avoid ambiguity, to pinpoint the true and to discard the false, to separate the wheat from the chaff, tends to make us seek and believe in very sharp answers to questions that have none.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
― W. H. Auden

“I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov