“After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.”
"Conversations with Gordon Roper".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)
“After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.”
"Conversations with Gordon Roper".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)
“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”
Variant: We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
Source: Comically Inefficient: Joseph Herscher’s Machines https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2017/08/22/joseph-herscher-machines/ (Aug 22, 2017)
As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee
“Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”
"Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).
As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee
Context: Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us.... We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.