Negative Matter: The Library

Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Library

Being in a Public Library, surrounded by towers of books makes me humbled and elevated at the same time.

“Knowledge is sacred” my high school Physics teacher used to say. He was an Atheist, a model Humanist to the bone.

The Public Library is a quiet place, where we let our Reason to guide us in acquiring Knowledge.

Books after books, pages after pages, we find Knowledge is stacked, generously offered, reaching us from memories of our mortal ancestors who felt they needed to share what they knew.

Behind every book we browse, every page we turn, there had been hardship of some sort. Sleepless nights, Censorship, Inquisition, Torture, Vandalism, Wars, Fires.

Books made it before where we stand, despite odds and evil intentions, thanks to sacrifices made by their authors and protectors. This is why I feel so humbled every time I visit a library.

Humanity excels with Knowledge, in this sense and considering all aforementioned hardship behind it, yes, Knowledge is sacred and evolving.

We all have responsibility to nurture Knowledge and pass it on intact to future generations if we care about wellbeing of Humanity beyond our times.

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In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.

- Socrates, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ― Elie Wiesel

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well, and over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship. A kind of divine North Korea. - Christopher Hitchens

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. - Franz Kafka

Developing love and compassion and reducing anger and spite is a universal activity which requires no faith in any religion whatsoever- Dalai Lama

No victory is irreversible, no defeat is definitive. That is what makes life worth living. – Leszek Kolakowski

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.-Stephen Hawking

There is in every village a torch: The schoolteacher. And an extinguisher: The priest.- Victor Hugo

We find beauty in something done well.- Denis Dutton

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. -Richard Dawkins

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.- Peter Ustinov

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
- Seneca

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”
- Richard Feynman

"Best things in life aren't things."
- Derek Sivers

"Physicists spend a large part of their lives in a state of confusion. It's an occupational hazard. To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity."
- Brian Greene

"The liar knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress."
- Harry Frankfurt

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."
- Michel Foucault

"The validity of an idea or action is determined not by whether it is widely believed or widely reviled but by whether it obeys the rules of logic. It is not because an argument is denounced by a majority that it is wrong nor, for those drawn to heroic defiance, that it is right."
- Alain De Botton

"A defining property of living systems is that they self-assemble against nature's tendency toward disorder, or entropy"
- Erwin Schrödinger