Month: November 2022

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. Albert Camus, The Fall, p. 110

Above all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion they have of themselves by providing them with with the additional assurance they will find in your promise of sincerity. Albert Camus, The Fall, p. 82

Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate. – Albert Camus, The Fall, p. 77

I was of respectable but humble birth (my father was an officer), and yet, certain mornings, let me confess it humbly, I felt like a king’s son, or a buring bush. It was not a matter, mind you, of the certainty I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Bsides, such certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it. – Albert Camus, The Fall p. 28.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library. – Albert Einstein

The universe is what it is, not what I choose that it should be. If it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman and supernatural purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is far better to understand and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we may find comfortable.

The universe is neither hostile nor friendly; it neither favors our ideals nor refutes them. Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of humankind will be brief if measured on an astronomical scale. But that is no reason for not living it as seems best to us. The things that seem to us good are none the less good for not being eternal, and we should not ask of the universe an external approval of our own ethical standards.

The freethinker’s universe may seem bleak and cold to those who have been accustomed to the comfortable indoor warmth of the various religious cosmologies. But to those who have grown accustomed to it, it has its own sublimity, and confers its own joys. In learning to think freely we have hopefully learnt to thrust fear out of our thoughts, and this lesson, once learnt, brings a kind of peace which is impossible to the slave of hesitant and uncertain credulity.

— Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery (1944), pp. 40-41

The greatest fallacy in, or rather the greatest objection to, teleological thinking is in connection with the emotional content, the belief. People get to believing and even to professing the apparent answers thus arrived at, suffering mental constrictions by emotionally closing their minds to any of the further and possibly opposite “answers” which might otherwise be unearthed by honest effort — answers which, if faced realistically, would give rise to a struggle and to a possible rebirth which might place the whole problem in a new and more significant light. – John Steinbeck

The stories we tell, in politics as in life, leave us stuck in the past even as we’re forced, pitilessly, into the future. – Ezra Klein