Daily Dose

From Letters from an Astrophysicist, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

SCIENCE

"It's a system of knowing the natural world that is immune to opinion, but not to experiment."

From Seeing Eye to Eye

Daily Dose

From The Crooked Timber of Humanity, by Isaiah Berlin

MIDDLE AGES

"One was obliged, of course, to lay down one's life for the truth, but there was nothing noble in dying for a falsehood, even if one mistook it for the truth. The notion that the truth is not necessarily one, that values are many, that they may conflict, that there is something sublime in dying for one's own vision of the truth even though it may be condemned by the rest of the world -- that, I think, would before the eighteenth century have seemed to be a very eccentric position."

From European Unity and It's Vicissitudes, III

Daily Dose

From Tremendous Trifles, by G. K. Chesterton

THE GLOOMY VIEW

"The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous Tradition; and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits. Now they are beginning to believe in rather slow spirits."

From Chapter Seventeen, The Red Angel

Daily Dose

From The Sickness Unto Death, by Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Alastair Hannay

ENVY

"Envy is concealed admiration. A man who admires something but feels he cannot be happy surrendering himself to it, that man chooses to be envious of what he admires. He then speaks another language. In this language of his the thing he admires is said to be nothing, something stupid and humiliating and peculiar and exaggerated. Admiration is happy self-surrender, envy is unhappy self-assertion."

From Part Two, Despair is Sin