David Eddings · 800 pages
Rating: (13.5K votes)
“Refusing to talk about something wouldn’t make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“...most people need to believe in something. There are a few who don't, but they're a bit unusual.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“Degrur, that doesn’t make any sense at all.” “I just woke up,”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“Just because I love her, it doesn't mean that I love you less.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“Some stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Other stories never end, maybe because they’re alive.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“doesn’t make any sense,” he said. It was all he could do, however, to keep from throwing the dreadful sheet into”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“Bheid and Leitha, but he didn’t say anything.”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.' ~Althalus”
― David Eddings, quote from The Redemption of Althalus
“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.
Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.
How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“Be terrified. Nothing in life is certain. It does not owe you anything, and if it decides to take something from you it will. You must accept this truth. Accept the dreadful possibility that your blind optimism is merely a fancied lie.”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it's compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
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