Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist
What do you mean by you?"
volume I; lecture 8, "Motion"; section 8-1, "Description of motion"; p. 8-2
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist
What do you mean by you?"
volume I; lecture 8, "Motion"; section 8-1, "Description of motion"; p. 8-2
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)
Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Variant: and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist
Rejoinder when told that he couldn't talk about physics, because "nobody [at this table] knows anything about it."
Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake", p. 310.
Quoted in Handbook of Economic Growth (2005) by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
“No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves”
Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer
Source: I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me
Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer
The Power of Your Supermind
“We only talk of what we know, so as to know of little is to talk of little”
Book: Cometan, the Omnidoxy
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher
Book II: Astronomy, Ch. I: General View
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853)
Kathy Acker (1947–1997) American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet
Kathy Acker: Where does she get off?
Context: Bataille is associated with the surrealists. Basically the idea is that democracy doesn't work. Communism doesn't work. All these fucking models aren't working. We've got to find some new models — a model of what society should look like.
We don't know what humans are like. And the ground is not economics; it's not like people do everything they do for economic reasons. You've got to look at the imagination; you've got to look at sex. We have no way of describing these things using the language we have. So a group was formed around Bataille to try to figure out what it means to be human — what society should look like.
Humans have to live in a society — they can't just survive as individuals. That's not a viable condition. You know, everyone's always talking about trauma and pain and how this society isn't working, that we shouldn't have racism and sexism, but we never talk in positive terms — like what would joy be, what it would be like to have a totally great existence. Bataille and his followers looked for models for people to have totally great existences. … Well, they looked at tribal models and how they dealt with sexual stuff and sacrifice and property — the joys that aren't based on economic accumulation and the workaday world, but based on giving it all up — not having that specific, controlling, imprisoning "I." He wasn't a Freudian. He was much more interested in the tribal model where everything is on the surface and you deal with sexual stuff the same way you deal with economic stuff and social stuff.
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“A Thought about Ourselves,” p. 122
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Hopelessness”