The universe assigned the tasks of speaking and kissing to the lips because there is never a need to do both at the same time.
Clipping
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
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web > Science and art are different kinds of truth
[https://flashbak.com/raymond-chandlers-guide-to-street-hoodlum-and-prison-lingo-443428/]
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first truth is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would be a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from being ridiculous.
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books > Nobody's Son (Stewart, Sean)
“His work is, is well proportioned,” she said cautiously. “It always gives the ear what it expects, which satisfies an audience.” “But can, perhaps, not move them?” “Precisely my thought too, mi’lord,” Janseni said with some relief. The musician leaned forward with increasing passion. “Is it the place of art to merely give the people what they want? Or should we teach them to want more, expect more, hear more! Art, real art, something more than balance and proportion must possess. It must have fire. Art must have a vision, a challenge and a lesson to bring before its audience.”
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books > Nobody's Son (Stewart, Sean)
Faith is a candle where Reason is the sun, No one needs a candle: until darkness falls.
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books > When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.
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books > When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.
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books > When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
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books > When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
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books > Only Forward (Voyager Classics) (Smith, Michael Marshall)
There are whole Neighbourhoods out there where no one has had anything to do all their lives. They’re born, and from the moment they hit the table, there’s nothing to do. They clamber to their feet occasionally, realise there’s nothing to do, and sit down again. They grow up, and there’s nothing, they grow old and there’s still nothing. They spend their whole lives indoors, in armchairs, in bed, wondering who they are. I grew up in a Neighbourhood like that, but I got out. I got a life. But when that life slows down, the disease creeps up real fast. You’ve got to keep on top of it.
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books > Only Forward (Voyager Classics) (Smith, Michael Marshall)
She’s a characterful person, Zenda, and doesn’t take any shit. She’s my contact at Action Centre, the area where all the people who are into doing things hang out. It’s a whole Neighbourhood, with offices and buildings and shops and sub-sections, all totally dedicated and geared up for people who always have to be doing something. Competition to get in is pretty tough, obviously, because everyone is prepared to do what it takes, to get things done, to work, all the fucking time. A hundred per cent can-do mentality. Once you’re in you’ve got to work even harder, because there’s always somebody on the outside striving twenty-five hours a day to take your place.