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Quote by Penelope Lively

“History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.”

Quote by Penelope Lively

Book:Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time
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Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time

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Penelope Lively

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“We want to be told stories, and there is nothing wrong with that—except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality. Could it be that fiction reveals truth while nonfiction is a harbor for the liar? Could it be that fables and stories are closer to the truth than is the thoroughly fact-checked ABC News? Just consider that the newspapers try to get impeccable facts, but weave them into a narrative in such a way as to convey the impression of causality (and knowledge). There are factcheckers, not intellect-checkers.”

LifeFactsNarrative Bias
Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Humankind has accumulated generation upon generation of knowledge, the culmination of which is the vast and useful technological array we see everywhere in modern society. Despite this great accumulation of knowledge and technology, we still suffer from starvation and war. The difference between the past and the present is the difference between throwing rocks and shooting missiles. We are still in conflict. Suffering on a fundamental level hasn’t ceased. But we nevertheless persist in the notion that if we just amass a bit more knowledge, we’ll all be o.k. Maybe a new philosophy will do the trick, or a new system of government. But all of this has been tried many times. Knowledge builds on the past and has its place. Wisdom is beyond time. It’s the direct perception of reality as it is. And in this direct seeing of what is lies the potential of transformation—a transformation that is not merely a redecoration of the past but a transformation of humanity that embodies the eternally new.”

PhilosophyWisdomHumanityKnowledgeMeditationPerceptionYogaTransformationKiNakamura TempuShin Shin Toitsu Do
Book:Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
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