…no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

…the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness. The list of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association tripled between 1952 and 1994, when it included almost three hundred disorders, including Avoidant Personality Disorder (which applies to many people who formerly were called shy), Caffeine Intoxication, and Female Sexual Dysfunction. The number of symptoms needed to justify a diagnosis has fallen, and the number of stressors that may be credited with triggering one has increased.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and capricious the human intellect is.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

Let a parent try punching the principal, and we’ll see how far “It doesn’t matter who started it” gets in front of a judge.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

…[incompleteness theorems] apply to axiomatic formal systems or computers in which one can do arithmetic. Thus, they do not apply to many kinds of texts, such as religious texts—the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Buddhist sutras—and typically not even to theories in the natural sciences.

— Richard Tieszen, Simply Gödel