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Quote by Georges Courteline

“Il s'abattait sur un bureau à la façon d'une nuée de sauterelles, et tout de suite c'était la fin, le carnage, la dévastation : la coulée limpide du ruisselet que la chute d'un pavé brutal a converti en un lit de boue.”

Quote by Georges Courteline

Work

Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir

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Author

Georges Courteline
Georges Courteline

Georges Courteline, born on June 25, 1858 and died on the same day in 1929, was a renowned French dramatist. He was known for his humorous and satirical style of drama. more

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“La plupart des animaux et des plantes qui vivent tout auprès d'un petit terrain, quel qu'il soit, pourraient vivre sur ce terrain, en supposant toutefois que sa nature n'offrît aucune particularité extraordinaire; on pourrait même dire qu'ils font tous leurs efforts pour s'y porter, mais on voit que, quand la lutte devient très vive, les avantages résultant de la diversité de structure, ainsi que des différences d'habitudes et de constitution qui en sont les conséquences, font que les habitants qui se coudoient ainsi de plus près appartiennent en règle générale à ce que nous appelons des genres et des ordres différents.”

“Chaos et âge d'or sont les termes mythiques de la relation normative fondamentale, termes en relation telle qu'aucun des deux ne peut s'empêcher de virer à l'autre. Le chaos a pour rôle d'appeler, de provoquer son interruption et de devenir un ordre. Inversement, l'ordre de l'âge d'or ne peut durer, car la régularité sauvage est médiocrité ; les satisfactions y sont modestes – aurea mediocritas – parce qu'elles ne sont pas une victoire remportée sur l'obstacle de la mesure.”

“To conclude: time doesn’t pass. (I hope the reader is now convinced!) Well, what does pass, then? I shall argue that it is the conscious awareness of the fleeting self that changes from moment to moment. The misconception that time flows or passes can be traced back to the tacit assumption of a conserved self. It is natural for people to think that ‘they’ endure from moment to moment while the world changes because ‘time flows’. But as Alice remarked in Lewis Carroll’s story, ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ Alice was right: ‘you’ are not the same today as you were yesterday. To be sure, there is a very strong correlation – a lot of mutual information, to get technical about it – between today’s you and yesterday’s you – a thread of information made up of memories and beliefs and desires and attitudes and other things that usually change only slowly, creating an impression of continuity. But continuity is not conservation. There are future yous correlated with (that is, observing) future states of the world, and past yous correlated with (observing) past states of the world. At each moment, the you appropriate to that world-state interprets the correlation with that state as ‘now’. It is indeed ‘now’ for ‘that you’ at ‘that time’. That’s all! The flow-of-time phenomenon reveals ‘the self’ as a slowly evolving complex pattern of stored information that can be accessed at later times and provide an informational template against which fresh perceptions can be matched. The illusion of temporal flow stems from the inevitable slight mismatches.”