Quotes
El hombre no era joven, pero a mi edad (quizá también la suya) se hace difícil traducir a números la imagen oscilante de caracteres físicos de una persona que ronda la salida de los treinta. Hay un día, no marcado en el almanaque, cuando uno deja atrás la confiada aritmética de los años y con azoramiento e indefinible melancolía empieza a preguntarse si ese otro fantasma nacido entre la juventud y la vejez es mayor o menor. Que uno, por supuesto.
Vlady Kociancich, Todos los caminos, Buenos Aires, 1991
Mi pensamiento es pesimista; mi sentido vital es optimista. A mí me encanta la vida, yo me divierto con vivir. Si oigo una frase que me hace gracia, estoy contentísimo; si he soñado un sueño que me parece divertido, de algún modo estoy encantado; si se me ocurre una idea, lo mismo… Me gusta leer, me gusta ir al cine… Yo tengo la impresión de que, cuando hago el balance de mis días, en general puedo decir que me he divertido y que, en los días estériles, tampoco lo pasé tan mal. En cambio, si yo reflexiono sobre la vida, pienso que nada tiene demasiada importancia porque seremos olvidados y desapareceremos definitivamente. Eso es lo que yo pienso. Yo creo que nuestra inmortalidad literaria es a corto plazo, porque un día habrá tanta gete, que no se podrán acordar de todos los escritores que hubo en un momento. O se acordarán muy imperfectamente. Ya no seremos materia de placer para nadie: seremos materia de estudio para ciertos especialistas, que quieran estudiar tal y tal tendencia de la literatura argentina de tal año. Y, después de todo eso, un día la Tierra chocará con algo, ya que la Tierra, como todas las cosas de este mundo, es finita. Un día desaparecerá la Tierra, y entonces no quedará el recuerdo de Shakespeare, y menos aún el de nosotros. Así que pienso que, teniendo en cuenta todas estas cosas, nada de la vida es muy importante. Entonces, yo casi podría reducir la importancia de la vida a una idea: la idea de que son importantes las cosas que, por lo menos, nos hacen estar complacidos. Vale decir: a mí, por ejemplo, me duele algo que es cruel o es deshonesto. O inclusive algo que sea desconsiderado con otra persona: eso me duele. Entonces, salvo hacer esas cosas y salvo hacer las que dan placer y dan alegría, nada tendría importancia.
Fernando Sorrentino and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Siete conversaciones con Adolfo Bioy Casares, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 240-241
Pensé alguna vez que mi cara no era la que yo hubiera elegido. Entonces me pregunté cuál hubiera elegido y descubrí que no me convenía ninguna. La del joven del guante, de Tiziano, admirable en el cuadro, no me pareció adecuada, por corresponder a un hombre cuyo género de vida no deseaba para mí, pues intuía que en él la actividad física prevalecía en exceso. Los santos pecaban del defecto opuesto: eran demasiado sedentarios. A Dios padre lo encontré solemne. Las caras de los pensadores se me antojaron poco saludables y las de los boxeadores, poco sutiles. Las caras que realmente me gustan son de mujer; para cambiarlas por la mía no sirven.
Sara Facio y Alicia D'Amico (ed.), Retratos y autorretratos, Buenos Aires, 1973
Malas noticias. Parece que el gobierno va a impedir los viajes al Uruguay. Grotesco. Todo lo que quiera. Constitucionalmente imposible. Por lo tanto, verosímil.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ad porcos, Historias de amor, Madrid, 2002, p. 179
Como ocurre con las mujeres que nos gustan, todo me gusta en ella, desde el color oscuro del pelo hasta el perfume que sus manos dejan en las mías.
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Historias de amor, Madrid, 2002, p. 21
To some, the possibility that great religious figures might have been influenced by epileptic experiences negates the reality of the religious beliefs that resulted from them. Yet to others, the resulting revelations are “no less expressive of truth than Dostoevsky’s novels or Van Gogh’s paintings.” Evidence does exist of an organic basis for instinctive reactions that give rise to beliefs about a moral order resulting in a religious experience. However, some would argue that this is merely the way by which a spiritual God interacts with us mortal beings.
Michael S. Gazzaniga, The ethical brain: the science of our moral dilemmas, New York, 2005, p. 159
Se designó a sí mismo “el primer trabajador” y reunía a miles de personas que estaban obligadas a cantarle “Perón, Perón, que grande sos”. Una persona que actúa así debe de estar loca.
Jorge Luis Borges, Borges verbal, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 149-150
What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of religion, is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of bigotry[.]
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in J. M. Robson (ed.) The collected works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, pp. 213–310, p. 2
About other people’s ideas, Mill says, Bentham’s only question was, were they true? Coleridge, in contrast, patiently asked after their meaning. To pin down the fundamental norms of our thinking calls for careful psychological and historical inquiry into how people think, and also into how they think they should think—what kind of normative attitudes they display in their actions and their reflection. These must be engaged with to be understood. So thinking from within is inherently dialogical. And it always remains corrigible. Both points are significant in Mill’s argument for liberty of thought and discussion.
What gives this method a critical and systematic edge? It can examine whether some normative dispositions are reducible to other such dispositions. It can also consider whether some are explicable in a way that subverts their authority. Suppose I can explain your low opinion of your brother’s intelligence as the product solely of sheer envy and resentment. That will subvert this opinion: it may be true, but your grounds for thinking it is are not good ones. Or an example Mill would have liked: normative notions of what women’s role should be may simply reflect unequal power relationships between men and women. That, if true, subverts these normative views. It does not show they are false but it does show that they are not justified. Thinking from within seeks to establish what basic normative dispositions are not subvertible in this way, but are resilient under reflection and thus preserve normative authority.
John Skorupski, Why read Mill today, London, 2006, pp. 9-10
Según Popper, no habría un paraíso de enunciados fácticos: solo existirían el infierno de las falsedades y el purgatorio de las conjeturas por falsar.
Mario Bunge, 100 Ideas: El libro para pensar y discutir en el café, Buenos Aires, 2006, pp. 105-106
All behavior patterns can in principle be altered by environmental intervention. The fact that currently we can alter some patterns and not others is a problem of knowledge and technology.
David M. Buss, The evolution of desire: strategies of human mating, New York, 1994, p. 17
At some level, we still hadn’t swallowed the hardest-won truth of all: The universe is indifferent.
Greg Egan, Luminous, London, 1998, p. 171
Happiness always brought with it the belief that it would last[.]
Greg Egan, Reasons to be cheerful, Reasons to be cheerful, no. April 1997, 2004, p. 191
Society was not invented by reasoning men. It evolved as part of our nature. It is as much a product of our genes as our bodies are.
Matt Ridley (ed.), The origins of virtue: human instincts and the evolution of cooperation, London, 1996, p. 6
People are less modern than the times in which they live[.]
The New Yorker, 2007
Philosophy is the study of everything that counts, just as those ancient Greeks, who were as interested in the structure of matter and the existence of God as they were in the nature of good, always said it was.
Judy Jones and William Wilson, An incomplete education: 3,684 things you should have learned but probably didn't, New York, 2006, p. 304
[W]e didn’t marry, or get engaged, or even commit long-term. When you’re committed to the present, that can be hard to do.
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, New York, 2006, p. 287
The relentless application of the scientific method of inference from experiment and observation, without reference to religious or governmental authority, has completely transformed our view of our origins and relation to the universe, in less than 500 years. In addition to the intrinsic fascination of the view of the world opened up by science, this has had an enormous impact on philosophy and religion. The findings of science imply that human beings are the product of impersonal forces, and that the habitable world forms a minute part of a universe of immense size and duration. Whatever the religious or philosophical beliefs of individual scientists, the whole programme of scientific research is founded on the assumption that the universe can be understood on such a basis.
Few would dispute that this programme has been spectacularly successful, particularly in the 20th century, which saw such terrible events in human affairs. The influence of science may have indirectly contributed to these events, partly through the social changes triggered by the rise of industrial mass societies, and partly through the undermining of traditional belief systems. Nonetheless, it can be argued that much misery throughout human history could have been avoided by the application of reason, and that the disasters of the 20th century resulted from a failure to be rational rather than a failure of rationality. The wise application of scientific understanding of the world in which we live is the only hope for the future of mankind.
Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth, Evolution: a very short introduction, Oxford ; New York, 2003, pp. 2-3
One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education.
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, London, 1912
Strawson describes two kinds of philosophy, descriptive, and revisionary. Descriptive philosophy gives reasons for what we instinctively assume, and explains and justifies the unchanging central core in our beliefs about ourselves, and the world we inhabit. I have great respect for descriptive philosophy. But, by temperament, I am a revisionist. […] Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and persons, Oxford, 1984, p. x