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If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
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We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound, the spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them.
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God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.
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I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
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Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.
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Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind.
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What we fear is what we do not know. When something is cloaked by the darkness of uncertainty, it's a mystery. Allowing light to penetrate that darkness makes everything clear.
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Each of us is born into our own mysteries...but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!
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Mystery hovers over all things here below.
