T_Clark

Emerson - God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Kafka - It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at but your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Niels Bohr - It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

Stephen Jay Gould - In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."

Chuang Tzu - What I call good is not humankindness and responsible conduct, but just being good at what is done by your own intrinsic virtuosities. Goodness, as I understand it, certainly does not mean humankindness and responsible conduct! It is just fully allowing the uncontrived condition of the inborn nature and allotment of life to play itself out. What I call sharp hearing is not hearkening to others, but rather hearkening to oneself, nothing more.

C.S. Lewis - To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet - There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History - Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it.

Praxis—The deed precedes the meaning—only after the leap does the ground appear beneath the well-shoed foot.

P.W. Herman—We’re not here to think what we’re told to think, we’re here to put words to what we can see for ourselves.

R.G. Collingwood-- Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking.

R.G. Collingwood--[An absolute presupposition] is a thing we take for granted in [our thinking]. We don’t question it. We don’t try to verify it. It isn’t a thing anybody has discovered, like microbes or the circulation of the blood. It is a thing we just take for granted.

R.G. Collingwood--Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them....