"If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest-in all its ardor and paradoxes-than our travels."
— Alain de Botton
"The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"
— Blaise Pascal
"When you cannot understand a language, you listen with your eyes, the way a blind man sees with his ears."
— Alan Rabinowitz (Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed).
"We find ourselves today in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to the most optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable."
— Edward Carpenter (Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure)
"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it?"
— Whitman
Steve Jobs is now elemental - I shall always remember the passionate magician that he was. He is an inspiration to many.
(Source: icanread)
"There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself."
— An excerpt from “The Embodied Mind”
"The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects."
— Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)
"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents…. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning."
— Max Planck
"What I’ve endeavored to say in all my books is that the flaw in our civilization isn’t in the people, it’s in the system. It’s true that the system has been clanking along for ten thousand years, which is a long time in the timescale of an individual life, but when viewed in the timescale of human history, this episode isn’t remarkable for its epic length but for its tragic brevity."
— Daniel Quinn (Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure)
