Quotes Collection

“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.”

“If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”

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

“I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' ... the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that 'it was really him who was hailed' (and not someone else)... individuals are always-already subjects.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The methods for coming up with useful examples in mathematics... are even less clear than the methods for proving mathematical statements.”

“Each thing insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...examine these two ideas and determine how that which survives criticism in each is properly to be combined with the other...”

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

“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.”

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind.”

“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.”

“it is a common thing in political philosophy, that reactionary thinkers are more interesting than the progressive ones . . . in that you learn more about politics from people like Machiavelli and Schmitt than from Rousseau”

“Sellars's pragmatism dictates that issues of conceptual priority be translated into questions of the relative autonomy of different strata of language -that is, into questions concerning what language games can be played independently of and antecedently to which others.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The goal of AI should be to create systems that can learn and think like humans, but also go beyond human capabilities.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“This difference between the present and the actual, for Deleuze, is much more important than the difference between the present and the past. The present is what we are, and for that reason, what we are already ceasing to be; the actual is not what we are, but rather what we are becoming, what we are in the process of becoming.”

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”

“These arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied on to the human condition. They show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its supreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“The documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. I would say it's almost a Christian situation, where you have a victim that is suffering for you [the spectator] and through his suffering he redeems the spectator and more: He says, you are human because you feel my suffering.”

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

“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.”

“...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.”

“...'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.”

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

“Computers are a tool for conducting the network of conversations.”

“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.”

“...But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That's the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement's novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what's the point? . . . That's why arguments are such a strain, why there's never any point arguing. You can't just tell someone what they're saying is pointless. So you tell them it's wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn't that some things are wrong, but that they're stupid or irrelevant.”

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

“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.”

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

“It has long been my view that since there are so many books one can read, and so many things that one can do besides read books, the burden is always on the author to make the topic at hand more interesting than all of these other options.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

“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.”

“...First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must 'once in his life' withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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!'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”

“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.”

“KAPPA: But will they? What if God created polyhedra so that all true universal statements about them – formulated in human language – are infinitely long? Is it not blasphemous anthropomorphism to assume that (divine) true theorems are of finite length?”

“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”

“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.”

“...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...”

“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.”

“...different proofs of the same naive conjecture lead to quite different theorems”

“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.”

“But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”