"Assorted Landmines", p. 148
Awareness (1992)
Context: As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
“This book… too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.”
Prologue
The Society of Mind (1987)
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Marvin Minsky 65
American cognitive scientist 1927–2016Related quotes
Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xi; Lead paragraph of preview
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
“Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.”
Source: I Am the Messenger
“One Book is enough, but a thousand books is not too many!”
“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”
Keynote address, Democratic National Convention, New York (12 July 1976). (see External links)
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 14-15.
Context: One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of “slow economic strangulation,” his sense of never having enough to meet the requirement which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties.