Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent.
Bk. 18, ch. 5
Corinne (1807)
Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent.
Corinne (1807)
“By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream”
Interview http://www.templeton.org/features/grant/fqx/hp-sub01.html with the Co-Founders of the Foundational Questions Institute, Dr.Max Tegmark and Dr. Anthony Aguirre.
Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Context: The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.
“Inclination snatches arguments
To make indulgence seem judicious choice.”
Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
Interview with Luxemburger Wort (2015)
Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.
Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
“No one understands that you have given everything. You must give more.”
Nadie entiende que lo has dado todo. Debes dar más.
Voces (1943)
“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
This is generally reported as a French proverb, and one familiar as such in Russia as well, in many 19th and 20th century works; it seems to have first become attributed to Gautama Buddha without citation of sources in Farm Journal, Vol. 34 (1910), p. 417
Misattributed
[Martinus Veltman, Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics, World Scientific, 2003, 981238149X, 3, https://books.google.com/books?id=CNCHDIobj0IC&pg=PA3]
