2
" Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. "
― Matthew Arnold , Dover Beach and Other Poems
3
" ...he asked, " Where are you today, right now?" Eagerly, I started talking about myself. However, I noticed that I was still being sidetracked from getting answers to my questions. Still, I told him about my distant and recent past and about my inexplicable depressions. He listened patiently and intently, as if he had all the time in the world, until I finished several hours later." Very well," he said. " But you still have not answered my question about where you are." " Yes I did, remember? I told you how I got to where I am today: by hard work." " Where are you?" " What do you mean, where am I?" " Where Are you?" he repeated softly." I'm here." " Where is here?" " In this office, in this gas station!" I was getting impatient with this game." Where is this gas station?" " In Berkeley?" " Where is Berkeley?" " In California?" " Where is California?" " In the United States?" " On a landmass, one of the continents in the Western Hemisphere. Socrates, I..." " Where are the continents?I sighed. " On the earth. Are we done yet?" " Where is the earth?" " In the solar system, third planet from the sun. The sun is a small star in the Milky Way galaxy, all right?" " Where is the Milky Way?" " Oh, brother, " I sighed impatiently, rolling my eyes. " In the universe." I sat back and crossed my arms with finality." And where," Socrates smiled, " is the universe?" " The universe is well, there are theories about how it's shaped..." " That's not what I asked. Where is it?" " I don't know - how can I answer that?" " That is the point. You cannot answer it, and you never will. There is no knowing about it. You are ignorant of where the universe is, and thus, where you are. In fact, you have no knowledge of where anything is or of What anything is or how is came to be. Life is a mystery." My ignorance is based on this understanding. Your understanding is based on ignorance. This is why I am a humorous fool, and you are a serious jackass. "
6
" The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.2. Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.3. Death ends a life, not a relationship.4. Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.5. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too-even when you are in the dark. Even when you're falling.6. As you grow old, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, its also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it. "
8
" Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. "
― Jonathan Safran Foer , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
17
" I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.
From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.
We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. "
― Socrates