“For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg until it’s been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn’t do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.”
“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
“The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”
“The moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground —intelligible perspective, in a word.”
—
William James, American philosopher and psychologist who had trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States (1842-1910),
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, (
1890), Cosimo, Inc., Apr 30, 2007, p.402.
“Often there are two different reasons given for this natural desire to simplify. First is that we as humans have a very limited imagination and whichever medium we use to understand the world - be it science, religion, philosophy, or art - we will end up exploting the same limited set of ideas available to us.”
“I have found a new potential inherent in things — their ability to gradually become something else. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances.”
“We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.”
“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”
“If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true — not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.”
