djoshuva's reviews
268 reviews

"Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status. And, even more pointedly, to be humble is to revel in the accomplishments or potentials of others—especially those with whom one identifies and to whom one is linked organically."

"One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else." (No Exit)

"What this means is that one should not equate externalization with alienation. The externalization which concludes a cycle of dialectical process is not alienation, it is the highest point of the dis-alienation: one really reconciles oneself with some objective content not when one still has to strive to master and control it, but when one can afford the supreme sovereign gesture of releasing this content from oneself, in setting it free."

"Words do not cognize external objects. They cognize only their own Reflections. And on account of the force of ignorance words mistake their own internal reflections to be external objects. This is all that they can do. Words cannot even touch the object."

"This is what was meant by a holy life. This is what the way of the cross demanded."

"We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotional circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience."

"This is the secret to Everettian Quantam Mechanics, The Schrodinger Equation says that an accurate measuring apperatus will evolve into a macroscopic superposition, which we will ultimately interpret as branching into separate worlds. We didn't put the worlds in, there were always there, and the Schrodinger Equation inevitably brings them to life."