A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (1894 –1940) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry."[1] Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940 by the Stalinist regime. (Via Wikipedia)

1. The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

2. If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

3. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

4. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

5. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

1. "There is no greatness without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking. One might profit by classifying men in this respect. The one kind are those in whom there is no madness at all ... and are so-called men of intellect whose works and deeds are nothing but cold works and deeds of the intellect... But where there is no madness, there is, to be sure, also no real, active, living intellect. For wherein is intellect to prove itself but in the conquest, mastery, and ordering of madness?"

1. "I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none."

2. "Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics."

3. "When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins."

1. "But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously..."

2. "I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often."

3. "Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies."

1. "Did the genome of our cave-dwelling predecessors contain a set or sets of genes which enable modern man to compose music of infinite complexity and write novels with profound meaning? …It looks as though the early Homo was already provided with the intellectual potential which was in great excess of what was needed to cope with the environment of his time."

-Susumu Ohno (geneticist, 1928-2000)

1. "But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

2. "Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!"

3. "Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!"

1. "I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil."

2. "You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself."

1."Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference."
– Neil deGrasse Tyson

2. "Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination."
– Jonah Lehrer

3. "Above all, don't fear difficult moments. The best comes from them."
– Rita Levi-Montalcini

1. I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

- Isaac Newton

2. Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

- Fred Hoyle

"Since one never can absolutely know another, as this would mean knowledge of every particular thought and feeling; since we must rather form a conception of a personal unity out of the fragments of another person in which alone he is accessible to us, the unity so formed necessarily depends upon that portion of the Other which our standpoint toward him permits us to see."

1. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
- Karl Marx

2. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
- Albert Einstein

3. Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
- Max Planck

1. Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

2. I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws.

3. Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

Haruki Murakami

"According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend, there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that, the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half."
― Kafka on the Shore

Scientific Wisdom

1. Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
― Sigmund Freud

2. The sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do.
― Galileo Galilei

3. There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
― Albert Einstein

4. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
― Richard Feynman

5. Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
― Sir Isaac Newton

6. A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
― Charles Darwin

7. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.
― Richard Feynman

8. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
― Stephen Hawking

Tom Stoppard

"Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us."
― From The Coast of Utopia

Michel de Montaigne

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."

The wisdom of the epic sci-fi fantasy book Dune

1. "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." - Frank Herbert, 'Dune'.

2. "Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."

3. "The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future."

4. "It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult."

  Andy Warhol

"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what."
"My mother didn't love me." So what.
"My husband won't ball me. So what.
"I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what.
I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget."

― The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

1. "The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb."

2. "Our life is full of empty space."

3. "Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round."

4. "Beauty is boring because it is predictable."

5. "Translation is the art of failure.

6. "But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."