Quotes

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On History

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it": George Santayana: The Life of Reason, 1905, vol. 1, ch. 12.

"Only the dead have seen the end of war": George Santayana Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922, ‘Tipperary’.

“Fanaticism: consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim”: George Santayana The Life of Reason, 1905 vol. 1, introduction.

“The problem with socialism, is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”: Margaret Thatcher, Interview with journalist Llew Gardner, Thames Television’s This Week programme, 5 February 1976.

On Knowledge

“The New is rarely the good, because the good is only the new for a short time”: Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol 2: 453)

“So long as remorse last, guilt lasts”: J.L.Borges “Fictions”, p.338

“You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!”: Monty Python, Life of Brian.

“Neither good nor evil can last forever”: traditional Portuguese aphorism

On Philosophy

“That does not destroy us, make us stronger”: Fredrich Nietzsche, aphorism number 8 from "Maxims and Arrows" section, “Twilight of the Idols” (1888).

"This too shall pass": a Persian adage used also by medieval Persian Sufi poets, reflecting the ephemerality of the human condition, true in good or bad times.

“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident “: Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation”.

On Spiritual Life

“You have made us so as turn to You and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You”;
"Things which are not in their intended position are restless" (Saint Augustine, Confessions; pages 3 and 278, respectively)

What do you have that you did not receive? Paul, Corinthians 4:7

“It is a terrifying thing to have been born (…)”. Teillard de Chardin in King:1

"What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore, that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life." Wittgenstein, Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e.

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311

“You have made us so as turn to You and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You” (St Augustine)

On Novel Theories

The "Many-Worlds Interpretation" (MWI) of quantum mechanics holds that there are many worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time as our own. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics (in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/)

In order to study non-physical existence, new theoretical frameworks are tentatively being established that not only explain non-physical experience but also provide structures for systematic experimental investigation of non-physical world. In a recently proposed metacomputics model, it is presumed that an operating computer exists in Platonic realm, unifying consciousness, mind and matter (see www.metacomputics.com)

On Spiritual Journey

Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough.

(Thomas Merton, prayer before midnight mass at Christmas, 1941)