Brian Christian Quotes
Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Quotes to Explore
-
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
-
Ninoy Aquino was a friend; I knew his faults, which were outweighed by his virtues.
-
I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.
-
We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
-
Those possest of the greatest Virtues are always least pleas'd with the repetition of them.
-
Sex is not some sort of pristine, reverent ritual. You want reverent and pristine, go to church.
-
There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.
-
Football is the last sacred ritual of our time.
-
The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
-
Courage is the first virtue that makes all other virtues possible.
-
Greatness of Soul seems therefore to be as it were a crowning ornament of the virtues; it enhances their greatness, and it cannot exist without them. Hence it is hard to be truly great-souled, for greatness of soul is impossible without moral nobility.
-
Courage is the mother of all virtues because without it, you cannot consistently perform the others.
-
Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.
-
Now the soul of man is divided into two parts, one of which has a rational principle in itself, and the other, not having a rational principle in itself, is able to obey such a principle. And we call a man in any way good because he has the virtues of these two parts.
-
In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.
-
One is punished best for one's virtues.
-
It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.
-
As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.
-
Nothing in life is ritual.
-
Truth offends everyone outside its definitions. But the irony of truth is that the greater its potential for offense, the greater its potential for giving hope.
-
The public spirit is in the hands of the man who knows how to make use of it.
-
Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.
-
Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
