Ned Block quotes

Ned Block quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.'”
-- Ned Block

Source : Ned Joel Block (2007). “Consciousness, function, and representation”, The MIT Press

#Knowledge Quotes #Mind Quotes #Answers Quotes

“It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.”
“There are men that teach best by not teaching at all.”
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
“We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.”
“You should not be carried away by the dictation of the mind, but the mind should be carried by your dictation.”
“The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.”
“You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart. You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer.”
“The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.”

Source : Aaron Copland (1980). “Music and Imagination”, p.43, Harvard University Press
“I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.”
“We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”

Source : "SQ : Connecting with Our Spiritual Intelligence". Book by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, 2000.

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