Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it. But why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others—yes, and a lot less dangerous.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, rev. ed., New York, 1936, chap. 1
Se podría decir que hay anomia cuando la observancia contrafáctica […] de una determinada norma en un cierto grupo social sería eficiente en el sentido de que ese estado de observancia sería Pareto-óptima respecto de cualquier otra situación posible, incluyendo a la situación real de inobservancia, o sea en ese estado nadie estaría peor y alguno por lo menos estaría mejor. […] Sin embargo, este criterio no es operativo si tomamos […], como parte del grupo social relevante y como partícipes en la acción colectiva, a individuos que tienen propósitos lógicamente incompatibles con los de los demás. Por ejemplo, supongamos que algunos disfruten del caos de las calles porteñas, ya que lo consideran un sustituto gratuito del juego de los autos chocadores de los parques de diversiones.
Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 37-38
Eloquence and substance are what we should strive for in any form of expression.
John Schaefer, The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, rev. ed., Boston, 1999, p. 5
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, 1854
The mind of the opposite sex is an exotic dark continent at age 15, a partly-explored colony at age 35, and an over-familiar garden at age 55.
Geoffrey Miller, ‘Mating Intelligence: Frequently Asked Questions’, in Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller (eds.), Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System, New York, 2008, p. 378
It seems to me that there is a quality, which we cannot define but are perfectly well acquainted with, which may be called “Hedonic Tone”. It has the two determinate forms of pleasantness and unpleasantness.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, London, 1930, p. 229
Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation, and I have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations. For a number of years, I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly. It eventually seemed plain to me that these conclusions were forced on anyone who wants to take consciousness seriously. Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.
By now, I have grown almost happy with these conclusions. They do not seem to have any fearsome consequences, and they allow a way of thinking and theorizing about consciousness that seems more satisfactory in almost every way. And the expansion in the scientific worldview has had a positive effect, at least for me: it has made the universe seem a more interesting place.
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford, 1996, p. xiv