A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms
Giannis Delimitsos
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Hatred is the mask of the inept.”
“Before you think you are surrounded by idiots, make sure that you don’t suffer from narcissism.”
“When you stay silent, you listen. When you listen, you learn. When you learn, you know. When you know, you can understand. And when you understand, you may forgive.”
“We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will…”
“We are perhaps the funniest shattered pieces of the ongoing cosmic explosion; and the biggest troublemakers!”
“Today is the day. In fact, today is always the day, my friends!”
“The naive thinks that all wisdom lies within and no one can teach him. The wise became wise, because he accepted his nescience and opened his eyes to see the Wisdom and the Beauty around him.”
“The day you’ll start craving for a savior to deliver you is the day you’ll welcome any tyrant into your soul. Freedom is the game of the unsaved and the unsavable.”
“Of course, 1+1 makes 2 and blue to yellow gives green. But if we forget for a while the abstract knowledge or the laws of nature, and focus on the “knowledge” of particular situations, events, persons etc., then we can observe that it is almost never: “I know”; it is practically always: “I believe”. Humans and all the intelligent creatures of this world operate through beliefs, more or less justified, more or less true, more or less convincing. Because the biological apparatus of one hundred percent accuracy has not yet been “invented” in nature. And it never will.”
“Many ask: “Why are we so insincere, why are we so hypocrites?”. Well, it is because this is how human nature works. If there was a time and a place where human beings were 100% of the time honest, who always said what they had in mind and who didn’t care to cover their shortcomings by displaying a better persona than the “real” one, it is long since gone, wiped out from the relentless force of natural selection.”
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