I would just like to say how much I like this book.

Here are some quotes from it that really caught my attention:

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leavs a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.” (pg 7)

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” (pg. 134)

“…that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. … When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.” (pg. 189)

“If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant…then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.” (pg. 211)

“Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the predecessor of all real understanding.” (pg. 257)

“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. … Now its not just depressingly dull, its phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while.” (pg 263)

“…When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there’s some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiousity if perhaps that isn’t the way you should go too.” (pg 301)

peace