About fdrake

About Middle aged mathematics tutor and philosophy dilettante.
Location A fork in the road.
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Favourite quotations 'Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)' - Maxims, Grice

'If only I had the theorems I should find the proofs easily enough' - Riemann

'A cage went in search of a bird' - Zurau Aphorisms, Kafka

"Proof precedes the naive conjecture" - Proofs and Refutations, Lakatos

"If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot" - The Trouble With Being Born, Cioran

"...[T]he more listeners, the more passionless and sterile the account. To make it suit stereotype. The dreadful would look grand and the incomprehensible and obscure in the human being would be instantly explained. I would find myself in a desert of the past, filled with nothing but monuments." - The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich

"Would you dare let the dead outlive you? You are someone's ancestor, act accordingly" - Amir Sulaiman

"Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective, even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth." - Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer

"...vertigo is under the rubric soul what despair is under the rubric spirit..." - The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard

"We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse."
-The Other Tiger, Borges

"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false."
-Avatars of the Tortoise, Borges

"In the abysmal dark the soul is known by scent." - Heraclitus, Fragments

Trust - "the existential confidence that permits the rational suppression, overlooking, forgetting, or fortunate ignorance of each individual’s utter dependence on surrounding others, and hence each’s categorical helplessness; with our helplessness no longer in conscious view, we can attend to the world rather than ourselves, or ourselves as fully worldly beings." - Berstein, quoted in Ratcliffe's Experiences of Depression

"A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breath it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart" - Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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