"There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless. A
philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of
the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter - if not a
paragraph or a noun - in the history of philosophy. In literature this
ultimate decay is even more notorious."
Attributed to Omar Khayyam in Samarkand: A Novel by Amin Maalouf.
"...because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn't
exist and perhaps had never existed."
Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics.
"But how can one be warm alone?"
Ecclesiastes.
"Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?"
Al-Rahman, Koran.
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a
harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret
it as though it had an underlying truth."
Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum.
" 'Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,' answered
Holmes, thoughtfully. 'It may seem to point very straight to one thing,
but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in
an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.... There
is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact...' "
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Boscombe Valley Mystery.
"Any result attained by literature, as long as it is stringent and
rigorous, may be considered firm ground for all practical activities for
anyone who aspires to the construction of a mental order solid and complex
enough to contain the disorder of the world within itself; for anyone
aiming to establish a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same
thing as an absence of any method whatever."
Italo Calvino: The Uses of Literature.
"The only methodology left for the Rationalist faced with the
complexities of history: the despairing cry `Anything Goes'."
(loosely from) Paul Feyerabend: Against Method
"These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game,
constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several
sciences and arts ... which is capable of expressing and establishing
interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all
scholarly disciplines."
Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game.
"He undertook a task that was complex in the extreme and futile
from the outset."
Jose Luis Borges: Ficciones
