Quotes Collection

“the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”

“I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.”

“...'looks' talk is not an autonomous language game - one that could be played though one played no other. It is entirely parasitic on the practice of making risky empirical reports of how things actually are.”

“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”

“Language is far more idiosyncratic than has been admitted. Reasons are not necessarily and qua reasons public. They may be reasons for a very few, and none the worse for that. 'I can't explain. You'd have to know her.' If the common object is lacking, communication may break down and the same words may occasion different results in different hearers.”

“We are accustomed to call concepts metaphysical if we have forgotten how we reached them. One can never lose one's footing, or come into collision with facts, if one always keeps in view the path by which one has come.”

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time of peace. Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.”

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

“In fact, the confusing behaviors of 'cause' strike me as similar in their developmental origins to those that attach to 'force,' which isn't altogether surprising due to the fact that the applicational demands upon the two words are closely linked.”

“What faith is to religion, labor is to political economy: humans produce gods in the same way they produce automobiles.”

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”

“Thus in GM, Nietzsche contrasts two forms of happiness: that of the engaged active person 'bursting with strength' (GM, p. 23), and that of the passive powerless type for whom happiness is a disengaged escape: it is 'essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, 'sabbath' relaxation of the mind ... in short [it is] something passive!'”

“Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.”

“We decided not to ignore the present or forget the past. We're trying to set them aside and figure out together, not how to make the past better but how to make the future better. So, we created a bubble. We aren't out of touch at all. Not from what happened to the Jews or the Arabs. Not from what is happening now. But, we're applying maximum force to try and get this process moving.”

“When Foucault admires Kant for having posed the problem of philosophy, not in relation to the eternal but in relation to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal, nor to reflect on history, but to diagnose our actual becomings.”

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.”

“So, I think my problem, and 'our' problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

“We are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they have come to the end of life, will find that al along they have been living ad interim, they will be surprised to find that the veryt hing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was jut in the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time.”

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

“For me philosophy is an art of creation, much like music or painting. Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor truths. They are more along the lines of the Singular, the Important, the New. Concepts are inseparable from affects, i.e., from the powerful effects they exert on our life, and percepts, i.e., the new ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us.”

“Empirical knowledge is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.”

“Great philosophers coin new moral concepts and communicate new moral visions and modes of understanding. [...] From here we may see that the task of moral philosophers has been to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”

“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”

“...there are 'moral facts' in the sense of moral interpretations of situations where the moral concept in question determines what the situation is, and if the concept is withdrawn then we are not left with the same situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas, then there would be no facts 'behind them' for them to be erroneously defined in terms of.”

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

“I shall tell you. You yourself said you failed many times to fit them into a formula. Now what happened was this: you had three or four conjectures which in turn were quickly refuted. Your table was built up in the process of testing and refuting these conjectures. These dead and now forgotten conjectures suggested the facts, not the facts the conjectures. Naive conjectures are not inductive conjectures: we arrive at them by trial and error, through conjectures and refutations.”

“We now have technologies that can do for written and visual culture something like what prices do for economic information and bureaucratic categories do for social information. Large models generate representations of a vast and ungraspable whole that do not fully capture that whole but are manipulable and reproducible at scale.”

“For language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.”

“Ultimately, then, satisfaction is determined not by the world but by a declaration on the part of the requestor that a condition is satisfied. The case of 'fit' may seem extreme, but every condition of satisfaction ultimately rests on a declaration by an individual, within the background of a community.”

“Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence is a cake, the bulk of the cake is unsupervised learning.”

“Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

“He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.”

“I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate.”

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”

“The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says”

“Hilbert and de Broglie were as much politicians as scientists: they reestablished order.”

“Hilbert, who wrote a thesis on invariants in 1885, and in 1888 gave a much simpler, but noncomputational, proof of Gordan's result on binary forms, astonished the mathematical community in 1890 by showing that any form, of any degree, in any number of variables, has a basis. Hilbert adopted a new, conceptual, approach to the subject.”

“Bartlett et al. (2020) note 'the phenomenon of benign overfitting is one of the key mysteries uncovered by deep learning methodology: deep neural networks seem to predict well, even with a perfect fit to noisy training data.' However, benign overfitting behaviour can be reproduced with other model classes, can be understood intuitively, and is described by rigorous frameworks for characterizing generalization that have existed for decades.”

“To say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules. When God created Adam, he whispered in his ear, 'In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet.'”

“Neither are we yet at so deplorable a loss, in the other parts of what we call Science; but that we may meet with what will content ingenuity, at this distance from perfection, though all things will not completely satisfy strict and rigid inquiry. Philosophy indeed cannot immortalize us, or free us from the inseparable attendants on this state, Ignorance and Error. But shall we malign it, because it entitles us not to an Omniscience?”

“I have argued that to treat a plan – or any other form of prescriptive representation – as a specification for a course of action shuts down precisely the space of inquiry that begs for investigation; that is, the relations between an ordering device and the contingent labors through which it is produced and made reflexively accountable to ongoing activity.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

“On my view it might be said that, per contra, the primary general words could be dispensed with entirely and all moral work could be done by the secondary specialized words. If we picture the agent as compelled by obedience to the reality he can see, he will not be saying 'This is right', i.e., 'I choose to do this', he will be saying 'This is A B C D' (normative-descriptive words), and action will follow naturally.”

“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

“Instead of untangling every broken process, he just needs to define success and let AI navigate the mess. In fact, Bitter Lesson might actually be sweet: all those undocumented workflows and informal networks that pervade organizations might not matter. What matters is knowing good output when you see it.”

“For to notice something-to be aware of it in the sense relevant to assessments of sapience, rather than of mere sentience is to respond to it by applying a concept, making a noninferential judgment about it. So until one has the concept 'green, one cannot notice or be aware of green things, though one can respond differentially to them - obviously, in ways other than by applying the concept green.”

“Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working.”

“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”

“Re-engineering is cumulative and is what makes our cumulative cultures possible. And any engineering project must be responsive to real world constraints, thus realism. Our social, cognitive, and cultural ways of being are no less real than the rest of the natural world, and all together leave their marks.”

“A genetic intelligibility is grasped by a direct insight into some single driving factor that keeps the development moving through developmental phases, such as found in developmental models of stars, plants, human intelligence, and human morality. A dialectical intelligibility is grasped by an inverse insight that there is no single driving factor that keeps the development moving.”

“AI is not about replacing humans, it's about augmenting human capabilities.”

“The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.”

“Everyday conversation is not necessarily a morally neutral activity and certain ways of describing people can be corrupting and wrong. A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption. It is especially characteristic of normative words, both desirable and undesirable, to belong to sets or patterns without an appreciation of which they cannot be understood.”

“The people who hear the madman announce the death of God don't realize that this event, insofar as it is conceived merely as atheism, does nothing to overcome the governing will to nothingness. An unheroic, ethically unambitious, risk-averse civilization that laughs at supernatural ideas (for example, at their empirical unverifiability, their childlike hopes for absolute security, their licensing of religious bigotry, or the supposed logical impossibility of former articles of faith, such as God being both omnipotent and all-good) sees man as nothing more than a sophisticated animal, and takes it for granted that life and its goods can be conceived only in naturalistic terms – such a down-to-earth naturalism does not by these tokens affirm life.”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“The virtue of a logical proof is not that it compels belief, but that it suggests doubts.”

“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...”

“...We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-differentiated - communities.”

“...We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility.”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.'”

“This, then, is the first feature of an immanent ethics: it replaces the notion of the transcendental subject with immanent modes of existence that are determined by their degrees of power and relations of affectivity. In his later works, Foucault suggested replacing the term 'subject' with the term 'subjectivation.'”

“What formalism really means in Kantian ethics is an ethical purification that separates humans from the world. Ethics plays out entirely on the side of a human being's commitment to duty, to treating others as ends in themselves rather than solely as means, and in the end the world and its objects play no genuine ethical role.”

“...the abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us to penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act.”

“In the course of his argument, Ortega gains the important insight that each of us is an 'I' not because we each have a special zoological apparatus called 'consciousness', but because each of us is something, and that something can never be exhausted by conscious introspection any more than by outward description. It follows that every non-human object can also be called an 'I' in the sense of having a definite inwardness that can never fully be grasped”

“For he defined the mind by its epistemic status, as what is best known to itself by falling within the reach of the subject's incorrigibility and local omniscience.”

“Thus I believe that philosophers should fancy themselves as dedicated students of the irregular. But inherited fashions within our subject presently reward ersatz rigor and armchair pontification without encouraging the informed attention to detail and practical application upon which proper conceptual disentanglements characteristically depend.”

“The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“We sometimes go on as though people can't express themselves. In fact they're always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can't be preoccupied or tired without the man saying 'What's wrong? Say something…,' or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we're riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity's never blind or mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”

“It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.”

“While with Fraenkel and Sono we witness the birth of the abstract ring concept, with Noether and Artin we see the birth of abstract ring theory. Noether and Artin made the abstract ring concept central in algebra by framing in an abstract setting the theorems which were its major inspirations.”

“Thus although our sensations, as regards their quality, are only signs whose particular character depends wholly upon our own makeup, they are still not to be dismissed as a mere semblance, but they are precisely signs of something, be it something existing or happening, and — what is most important — they can form for us an image of the law of this thing which is happening.”

“Transfinites and infinitesimals are two types of infinite number, which characterize degrees of infinity in different fashions. In effect, this means that contemporary mathematics has 'two distinct rigorous formulations of the calculus': that of Weierstrass and Cantor, who eliminated infinitesimals, and that of Robinson, who rehabilitated and legitimized them.”