Inspiring Excerpts from Books (2025)

                                     Inspiring Excerpts from Books

1. "A mere 65 million years ago (less than 2% of the Earth's past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid struck what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated over 70 percent of Earth's land based flora and fauna-including all the dinosaurs, the dominate land animals of that Epoch. This ecological tragedy opened an opportunity for small, surviving mammals to fill freshly vacant niches. A big brained brand of these mammals, one we call primates, evolved a genus and species-Homo Sapiens-to a level of intelligence that enabled them to invent methods and tools of science; to invent astrophysics; and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

    Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve, And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear  furnaces within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the Universe we are a part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun."

- Neil Degrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith, "Origins", 2004

2. "According to James Gross, one of the leading researchers in emotion regulation, there are five ways that people effectively control their feelings. The first three are quite obvious: we can choose the situations we enter (situation selection), change those situations once we are in them (situation modification), or choose only to pay attention to the things which make us feel the way we want to feel (attentional deployment). The fifth one is pretty straightforward as well: we can try to change our emotional response by listening to some music, getting drunk, or getting some much needed sleep (response modulation). The fourth method, and the one we are most interested in here, is cognitive change. In other words, we make changes in our minds, perfectly healthy changes I might add, which allow us to determine our emotional experience from within.

    Practicing this art will allow you to gradually stop being upset by setbacks. Mastering it will put your emotional experience completely in your hands. If you take it on, you should expect to start hearing about how composed you remain in difficult situations. But this interpretation doesn't quite do justice to the psychitectural habits you will develop. You will learn how to rewire your emotions in real time, and the speed at which you can neutralize or reverse negative emotions will increase." - The Principles of Psychitecture, Designing The Mind LLC, 2021

3. So what is Dionysiac? This book contained an answer - 'one who knows' is speaking, the initiate and disciple of his god. Perhaps I would now be more discreet, less eloquent, in discussing such a difficult psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. One fundamental question is the Greek relation to pain, their level of sensitivity - was that relation constant? Or did it radically change? - the question of whether their ever more intense craving for beauty, for festivals, for entertainments, new cults, grew out of lack, out of depravation, melancholy, pain. If this is indeed so - and pericles (or Thucydides) would lead us to believe as much in his great funeral oration - what would be the origin of the oppositee craving that occured earlier in time, the craving of ugliness; the good, rigid resolve of the older Greeks for pessimism, for the tragic myth, for the image of everything terrible, evil, cryptic, destructive and deadly underlying of existence; what then would be the origin of tragedy? Perhaps joy, strength, overflowing health, excessive abundance? And what, then, would be the meaning, psyiologically speaking, of that madness out of which both tragic and comic art arose, the Dionysiac madness? What? Is madness not necessarily, perhaps, the symptom of degeneracy, decline, of the stage of a final culture? IS there perhaps such a thing - a question for psychiatrists - as neuroses of health? Of the youth and youthfulness of a people? Where does that synthesis of God and goat, the satyr, point? - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872

4. "If, after intuiting a number of simple propositions, we deduce something else from them, it is useful to run through them in a continuous and completely uninterrupted train of thought, to reflect on their relations to one another, and to form a distinct and, as far as possible, simultaneous conception of several of them. For in this way our knowledge becomes much more certain, and our mental capacity is enormously increased." Rene's Des Cartes, Rules for The Direction of The Mind, 1628-1701, Regulae ad directionem ingenni.

5. Sonnet XVIII -

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance or nature's course untrimm'd;

But they eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor loose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

-William Shakespeare, 1609, Sequence of 154 Sonnets