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This notion that intellectual rigor and kindness do not make good bedfellows is really misguided. It seems predicated on that old unexamined (and heavily gendered) bias between emotion and reason. But it’s a false distinction abrogated by both modern neuroscience and some very old texts.

— On the philosophy and neuropsychology of kindness, which is often falsely framed as a binary opposite to intellect (via curiositycounts)

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Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

— Dostoevsky (via weneverjumpship)

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To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story.

— Kathryn Shulz in one of 5 must-read books on error and the science of being wrong (via curiositycounts)

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Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

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Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

(via murakamistuff)

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Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.

— Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” (via sonofapritch)

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The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is good as dead.

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Albert Einstein

(via stefany)

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For this invention will encourage forgetfulness in the minds that use it because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom not true wisdom.

— Plato on writing, the “new media” of his day. From James Gleick’s excellent The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood – easily the most important book on media published since McLuhan (via)

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