The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.
The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world it...
Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between w...
Mathematicians prove all sorts of truths about numbers, truths that often assert the existence of certain numbers (for example, given two rational numbers, there exists a rational number between them)...
Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can infinitize us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to la...
Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air yo...
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.
Inside out, with all the Sturm und
Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its p...
If you don’t exert yourself, or if your exertions don’t amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.
There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel. (p. 343)