The job of the modern philosopher now runs in parallel with the job of the comedian and scientist: to help us wrap our minds around truths that come in strange packages which are no longer linear and predictable.

Scientific truth doesn’t fit into tidy packages anymore, and neither does our “human story.”

We are now forced to embrace paradox, ambiguity, and complexity into our everyday vernacular and figures of speech.

Gregg Eisenberg,
Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold On To

Once Gorky asked Tolstoy whether he agreed with an opinion Tolstoy had assigned to one of his characters.

“Are you very anxious to know?” Tolstoy asked.

“Very,” said Gorky.

“Then I shan’t tell you,” said Tolstoy.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

The study of human mind is so difficult, so caught in the dilemma of being both the object and the agent of its own study, that it cannot limit its inquiries to ways of thinking that grew out of yesterday’s physics.

Rather, the task is so compellingly important that it deserves all the rich variety of insight that we can bring to the understanding of what man makes of his world, of his fellow beings, and of himself.

That is the spirit in which we should proceed.

Jerome Bruner, Acts Of Meaning

Imagine a painting of a tree: a good, tall, healthy oak, standing proud on top of a hill. Now add a second oak to the painting, but . . . sickly: gnarled, bent, with bare branches.

As you look at that painting, your mind will understand it to be “about,” let’s say: vitality vs. weakness. Or: life vs. death. Or: sickness vs. health. It’s a realistic painting of two trees, yes, but there is also a metaphorical meaning implied, by the elements contained in it.

We “compare” the two trees (or “compare and contrast” them), at first, anyway, without thought or analysis. We just see them. The two trees stand there in our minds, juxtaposed, meaning by inference. We experience, rather than articulate, the result. The juxtaposition results in a feeling: instantaneous, spontaneous, complex, multitonal, irreducible.

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate.

Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant.

What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple.

But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real.

I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

George Saunders, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain

We seek to render our lives into meaningful stories that contribute in generative ways to the stories created by our children, our friends, our neighbors, our fellow citizens of the world.

To a large extent, the good life is justified by the good story.

And the good life story is one of the most important gifts we can ever offer each other.

Dan McAdams, Stories We Live By

Human beings are the only animals who ask questions, apart from owls, who always want to know who’s there.

Questions like: “Is there a meaning to life?” “What am I here for?” “How did these shoes get in my fridge?”

And, most weird of all: “How am I thinking these things?”

When you think about it, thinking about thinking is the hardest sort of thinking there is, which makes you think.

Philomena Cunk, Cunk On Everything

Life comes from physical survival.

The good life comes from what we care about.

Rollo May, Love & Will

The good life is a process, not a state of being.

It is a direction, not a destination.

Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person

“I can tell you this: No man is one thing. Only a fool believes that. And a fool is also not only one thing, either.”

“That makes a lot of—”

“For sometimes a fool can be the wisest of men. ‘If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.’ Carl Jung said that. There’s a great deal of truth in that sentiment. And of course Jung was such a great influence on my work, indeed on the whole of the twentieth century what with his introduction of the notion of the collective unconscience.”

“Unconscious,” I correct.

“What now?” he says.

“Collective unconscious,” I say.

“That’s what I said,” he says.

But it isn’t.

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

Nor is a person capable of making progress merely by virtue of being willing to drop a theory when it is refuted: one must also be seeking a better explanation of the relevant phenomena.

That is the scientific frame of mind.

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

As a naturalist, I yearn to extend my range like the nomadic lion, rhino, or Maasai. But in remote and unfamiliar territory, I must learn to read the landscape inch by inch. The grasses become braille as I run my fingers through them.

Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger

Science Nomad advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of phenomena.

Louis Pasteur

“Who am I?” he chanted.

“I’m an attorney named Willis Buttz—I mean, no, I’m, I’m nothing and I am everything, I am you and you are we and we are all one.”

One what?

“What?”

One what?

He stopped. He opened his eyes. He glared at me.

“Who the hell are you, you bastard, and how’d you get in here?”

Ed Abbey, Fool’s Progress