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All A Quotes

“As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one's self, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one's nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep when there is no mind, one should know one's self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form "Who am I?", is the principal means.”

“As all material creation consists of out-births of things spiritual, the spiritual world being the world of causes, and the natural world that of effects, and as effects are the repositories of their causes, the natural world is the reflection of the spiritual. For this reason, from the beginning of things, the sun has stood out as a pre-eminent symbol of the things of God. Of all inanimate things it bears the closest correspondence to the Supreme Being, for what it is in the natural world the Supreme Being is in the Spiritual. Its central fire is the correspondence of the essence of the Divine Nature--DIVINE LOVE; its heat the correspondence of the heat flowing from Divine Love, which is Divine Goodness and all that that comprises; its light the correspondence of Divine Truth which is the light proceeding from Divine Wisdom; and the union of heat and light in its central essence forever symbolizes the union of the Divine Love and Wisdom resulting from that of the Divine Will and Understanding. God is the SUN from whose heat and light--His Love and Wisdom--proceed all that is spiritual, and through the spiritual, by the medium of the natural sun, all that is natural. The sun is supreme in all natural things, and its operations run through all in its own world, but the Divine SUN from which it derives its origin is supreme in all and operates through all, above and below. And as the natural sun is everywhere present in its own realm, and all things derive their life and grow in more or less perfect measure according to their forms and distances, so is the Supreme One omnipresent, filling both the spiritual and the natural world.”

“As all nocturnal creatures, I have a tendency to wander about during the night, embracing and relishing in its mysteriousness, unexplained sounds, and thick aura of darkness. As a pianist I was drawn to compositions with the titles of Nocturne and Notturno - from Maria Szymanowska's Nocturne in B-flat to John Field and Frederic Chopin's Nocturnes. The night offers a myriad array of emotions from solace to absolute horror. I tried to infuse some of these terrifying thoughts, as well as solace that only night can bring into Night Soundings.”

“As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes." Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds. To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.”

“As all true gamblers know, the moods of luck, whether bad or good, are as changeable as the winds. One moment she might be with you, guiding you gently toward some distant paradise you never hoped to see; the next, she could be battering you to death against the rocks. A successful gambler therefore, the old man had said, is not one on whom luck never turns her back, but rather one who knows the moment to take their fate back from her into their own hands.”

“As also noted by Morris, empirical data from various lineages of fish and amphibians have shown, for instance, that more plastic clades tend to be more speciose than sister taxa of similar age but with less plasticity, due to a combination of greater opportunities to diversify and augmented evolvability of plastic features and thus of decreased risk of extinction. In addition, empirical studies show that even populations that derive from ancestors that were particularly overspecialized for a certain, very specific way of life, including parasitism, have successfully changed their behavior by becoming non-parasitic and displaying a morphology that is substantially different from that of their ancestors as seen for example in lamprey evolution. Morris argued that random variations arising in a population may decrease plasticity and that the plastically changed phenotype linked with the behavioral shift may be negatively affected. Therefore, these variants will be likely eliminated by selection, whereas variants that decrease plasticity in the direction of the plastic change will tend to be selected and spread through the population. This may lead to a situation in which the phenotype might appear similar across generations, but its plasticity is actually increasingly reduced until an environmental shift will no longer provoke phenotypic changes. As noted by Morris, Baldwin allowed for other non-mutually exclusive scenarios to occur, such as the rise of variants that increase plasticity in general, thus increasing the ‘fit’ between organisms and their environment and the degree to which evolution could be directed, thus leading to evolutionary trends.”

“as always, relationship is everything, and the capacities of the left are essential for the expression of the right's vision. If we can find ways to support leading with the perspective of the right hemisphere, the left's capacities can then offer essential assistance from its storehouse of prior learning.”

“As always, the dosas were perfect, crisp and lacy, and the unusual chef's addition of the habanero chutney made Naina's mouth burn in the best way. She'd inherited her ability to tolerate spice from her mother. Dr. Kohli was something of a wimp in this department, and so naturally Naina and her mother only ever ate the truly hot stuff when he wasn't around. "Never make people feel bad when you're better at something than they are," her mother had said with an unfamiliar amount of glee one night at dinner when her husband had been on call and she'd made the potato bhujia with enough red chili powder to make even Naina and her break into a sweat.”