Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vast majority of individual termites, belonging to the most highly evolved species, never leave their crowded fortress city, c...ould not see anything if they did, spend their entire existence in the narrow chambers and narrower tunnels of a labyrinth where they were born and where they breathe perpetually the damp, carbon dioxide atmosphere and dread more than anything else being compelled to leave it, even for an instant. The lives of certain human city dwellers who spend their days in air-conditioned offices, pass from them through tunnels of the subway to narrow chambers in some housing development, may seem remotely analogous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in t...erms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that's the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke--it deprives a man of the best part of life ... with a good cigar in his mouth a m...an is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him--literally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with t...hat bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief we ...are inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if it be true that death is annihilation, then the man who believes that he will certainly go straight to heaven when he dies,... provided he has fulfilled certain simply observances in this life, has a cheap pleasure which will not be followed by the least disappointment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the la...tter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »