[Deductive thinking] is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the Supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind’s refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explanation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me? Or as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shrewdly argues, “Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don’t like these laws, including the ‘two times two is four’?” Dostoevsky spurned the hegemaniacal logic and I can do no less.

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power, let it look at the world and say: “I am!” and let the higher power suddenly decree its annihilation, because for some reason—or even without explaining for what reason—that is needed: let it be so, I admit all that, but again comes the eternal question: why is my humility needed here? Isn’t it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me?

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…three “Great Untruths.” These are the belief that people are fragile (“Anything that doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the belief in emotional reasoning (“Always trust your feelings”), and the belief in Us versus Them (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people”).

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

…the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “Of all your meals, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game