boredom

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.

We think either of present or of threatened miseries, and even if we felt quite safe on every side, boredom on its own would not fail to emerge from the depths of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poison our whole mind.

Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him.

 

–Pascal’s Penseés, quoted in Porcupines: A Philosophical Anthology

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the possibilities are terrifying

“Land? Land is a ship too big for me, it’s a woman too beautiful, it’s a voyage too long, perfume too strong…. It’s music I don’t know how to make. I can never get off this ship.” —http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_1900

We cower in refuge within our chosen sport.

But it’s the best we can do!

“Clearly, the academics profession consists in playing a game, pleasing the editors of “prestigious” journals, or be “highly cited”. When confronted, they offer the nihilistic fallacy that “we got to start somewhere”—which could justify using astrology as a basis for science. And the business is unbelievably circular: a “successful PhD program” is one that has “good results” on the “job market” for academic positions. I was told bluntly at a certain business school where I refused to teach risk models and “modern portfolio theory” that my mission as a professor was to help students get jobs.” —Taleb

fear

I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.

TOCQUEVILLE

beautiful

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectator.

Shaw

Excesses are es…

Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnaminous, humble, or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves actors in a performance.

Hoffer

#quote #countersignaling

Lord Cutler Beckett: [Jack is about to light a cannon that’s pointed at the mast] You’re mad

Jack Sparrow: Thank goodness for that, ’cause if I wasn’t this would probably never work. [fires the cannon which catapults him onto his ship, landing safely on his feet behind his crew]

– Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

“Do you think I’ve gone round the bend?”
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland