ŷ������

“In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.”
― Albert Einstein

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“..если какой-нибудь свободный человек схватит свободную женщину за кисть руки, он должен будет заплатить 15 солидов; за руку ниже локтя - 30; выше локтя - 35; и, наконец, если он доберётся до груди - 45 солидов”
― Philippe Ariès, A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium

“For ants, service to the colony is everything. As individual workers approach natural death, it benefits the colony more for the old to spend their last days in dangerous occupations. The Darwinian logic is clear: for the colony, the aged have little to offer and are dispensable.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Tales from the Ant World

“So, you love the west," Tucker said.
"Sure do."
"Then it's a stupid love you got."
"How you figure?" I asked.
"'Cause the west don't love you back, son," Tucker said. "You're just whacking off in the sand. Sure, it feels all right, but you'll end up with nothing to show for it and just having to do it again. Plus, it ties up a perfectly good hand that you might be using for somethin' else.”
― Percival Everett, God's Country

“Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not”
― Massimo Vignelli