“Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.”
Joni Mitchell (1943) Canadian musician
"People's Parties"
Songs
Source: Sam's Letters to Jennifer
“Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.”
Joni Mitchell (1943) Canadian musician
"People's Parties"
Songs
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist
In "The Many Minds of Marvin Minsky (R.I.P.)" by John Horgan, Scientific American Blogs, 26 January 2016 http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-many-minds-of-marvin-minsky-r-i-p/
Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher
Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks http://singularity.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf, a chapter of Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic (2008) <br class="br">Context: The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.
Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker
Post to comp.os.minix newsgroup, 1992-01-29, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1992Jan29.231426.20469%40klaava.Helsinki.FI, To Andrew Tanenbaum (author of Minix) during the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate. <br class="br">1990s, 1991-94
Bernard MacLaverty book Midwinter Break
Ch 9 - p.187
Novels, Midwinter Break (2017)
Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter
"At The Very Mention Of Your Name" (song) <br class="br">Song lyrics <br class="br">Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "At The Very Mention Of Your Name" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNpIBp-wleI (song on YouTube. (Live performance in Japan, 1993.))
Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist
The Psychedelic Experience (1995)
Context: A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.
Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer
Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: Have you learned yet that you only suffer when you think about events or feel about them, that you don't suffer from events themselves? Have you learned yet that every thought about yourself is a thought of the past, that worry is thinking and that all thinking eventually leads to worry, fear and insecurity? If so, each time you go to think, or catch the thinker thinking even about "good" things like last night's movie, don't; stop. Not because Barry Long says so but because you've realised the truth of thinking in your own experience. It's what you've learned from life, not from someone else's experience. Therefore it is the truth for you now and every moment. Otherwise you must go on thinking and go on suffering. One day, when you've had enough of the pain, you'll come to your senses. Have you learned yet that every feeling is a feeling of the past and that every "good" feeling soon changes and eventually becomes the feeling of doubt, confusion, boredom or sorrow? If so, stop believing your feelings; don't act on them; wait.