All Quotes

"Faith in the infinity of movement: this is the secret of Hegel's thought. (p. 188)"

"In Hegel's vision of the universe, all guilt is erased. (p. 188)"

"In Wagner's “Tristan,” the drama of unhappy consciousness is revived in a theme already presented by Hölderlin and Novalis: the contrast between the separating clarity of the day and the primal unity of the night. Day is the world of reality in which the laws of loyalty and honor that govern civil life apply, and in which Tristan is the hero, the loyal warrior of King Marke. But the life of the day is nothing but an illusion in the face of the cosmic unity that binds souls to itself in their deepest absence and, once the illusory bonds are broken, submerges them in the universal breath of unconscious will. (p. 195)"

"In Heidegger, rethought philosophically, we find the terms of "Tristan]]": the “banal existence,” in which man disperses himself in chatter and in the superficiality of his social relationship with others, equivalent to the world of light that Tristan and Isolde betray and forget; ‘being-towards-death’, which for Heidegger is true historicity, where man finds himself faced with nothingness, equivalent to that world which the two lovers reach only through death, in the voluptuousness of submerging themselves in infinity. (p. 195)"

"And the fidelity to one's destiny that Jaspers, referring to Nietzsche, brought back to the forefront as a philosophical problem, does it not make us think of Siegfried, who only completes the meaning of his own myth in defeat and death, a death due to betrayal, it is true, but linked to the inability of the child hero to become, to be a man? And is there not something in Jaspers' fatal defeat, failure, or shipwreck that is desperately faithful to Wagner's pessimism?"

"When we talk about romanticism, we think of the defense of sentiment, of the irrational, of the impulse and passion of the infinite, of the taste for the obscure and the indeterminate. And it is true that the sense of the infinite is dominant in the Romantics. It is also true, however, that the Romantics sought in sentiment and, as in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, in eros, the solution to a dualism, the dualism between nature and spirit and between the unconscious and consciousness, which also includes the dualism between the finite and the infinite. (chap. 2, p. 15)"

"The ‘'Philosophy of Art’', written in 1931, is a crucial point in the thought of Gentile. Here, art exists only if it is not resolved in thinking thought, which, on the other hand, it cannot fail to do. However, if art is resolved in thinking thought, it is thought and not art, and as art it does not exist. Art posits itself but in positing itself it negates itself: it is elusive, it can be experienced but not thought. If it is thought, it dies. (chap. 3, p. 64)"

"The central point of Dilthey‘s philosophy is the conviction that 'categories arise from life’ and from the historical situation. [...]. There is no knowledge separable from life, there are no categories and methods not rooted in psychic experience, which mediates the fact and the awareness of the fact. (chap. 4, p. 85)"

"It’s a little bit embarrassing, but real in the sense that there was no deliberate move towards engineering. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, engineering was often a profession reserved for men and women were steered toward careers in healthcare and medicine."

"[...] Unamuno saw the characteristic of human existence in the drama of action torn between dream and reality, between the agony of the finite and faith. For Unamuno, existence can be saved in the paradox of Don Quixote's faith because dreams are an intensification of life: it is always a pragmatic tone that is highly critical of the rationality of thought and, ultimately, polemical towards philosophy itself. To live as “if Don Quixote's dream were reality”: this could be Unamuno's formula. (chap. 5, p. 123)"

"Hartmann [...] often said that what matters in philosophy are the problems and not the solutions [...]. (chap. VII, p. 194)"

"The future development of 20th-century philosophy could be determined, at least in part, by a revival of Husserlian philosophy. As Husserl's manuscripts are published, it becomes clear that not only Scheler and Hartmann should be interpreted in relation to the philosophy of Husserl, but that Martin Heidegger's existentialism is also part of a particular problem that arises from phenomenology. (chap. 8, p. 204)"

"The danger of Heidegger's philosophy lies not so much in its masked nihilism, which is always perceptible, but in the fact that, in its undeniable depth, this philosophy contains within it demands that cannot be rejected by contemporary thought, so that the value of many of Heidegger's analyses becomes a cover that often prevents us from recognizing the negative that constantly lurks behind the positive. (chap. 8, p. 210)"

"Enzo Paci, Introduzione all'esistenzialismo di Jaspers, in Logos, Vol. II, S. A. Editrice Perrella, Roma 1940."

"Enzo Paci, La filosofia contemporanea, series Saper tutto, Garzanti, Milano, 19634."

"We’re going to keep innovating and seeing how we can fill a void that’s out there involving speech and sound.” — Carol Espy-Wilson, founder and CTO of OmniSpeech"

"I became interested in noise problems while attending a workshop at NSF. People from various companies discussed issues with deploying speech technology over VOIP and dealing with everyday noise."

"Because of my training at MIT where we focused on understanding what’s unique about speech and understanding how it is produced. I could use my knowledge to deal with removing noise to help improve voice communications."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"You know one of the things I can say is that to get a doctorate — I have my doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT– you have to be willing to work hard and also have to be passionate about what you’re doing."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"Each of us lives other lives in our imagination, fueled by literature and the media. Through them, we attempt to remedy the limitations of our own existence."

"Goodness is beautiful insofar as it is governed by the right measure, by overall balance, by the middle ground established by the exact laws of virtue, which is “harmony.”"

"Death is never trivial: it is solemnity, it is mystery."

"Despite recurring announcements, it is [...] certain that philosophy, like art, is by no means “dead.” On the contrary, it is revived every season because it corresponds to needs for meaning that are continually—and often unconsciously—reformulated. Philosophy seeks answers to these questions, whether silent or explicit, by measuring and exploring the drift, conformation, and faults of those symbolic continents on which our common thinking and feeling rest."

"Every work of art carves out its own unique time and space."

"It can be said that the joy of thinking consists in crossing ever more distant boundaries, in moving away from initial assumptions in such a way that—once the journey is over, looking back—one can measure the extent of the distance traveled."

"Each of us is born without knowledge or will, at a specific time and place, with a body inherited from our parents, and we struggle hard to reach, in forced stages, an understanding of the world into which we have fallen. The risk is that, in the end, everyone forms their own opinions without comparing them."

"We are in a position to know very little, and with our vast ignorance, we all need to seek the truth, which cannot be reduced to mere opinion, especially today when there is a worrying return to illiteracy and a infantilization of the public for which the media, especially television, are responsible, as they tend to simplify every message."

"I don't like the fact that you try to drive a wedge between atheists and agnostics."

"Read the differences because only then can we discuss, otherwise it's just unctuous and ceremonial."

"I was resistant to the notion of mentors for a long time, and part of that was probably me being defensive in the sense that people don’t randomly come up to folks like me and nominate us. For a long time, I didn’t get opportunities to interact with mentors in the way you might traditionally describe, but I did have interesting experiences."

"That singular experience is why you are able to have this conversation with me today. The level of confidence that she had in making that proclamation that I could be an engineer was enough to carry me through. I went from that horribly failed exam to getting an A in the class."

"There’s an interesting journey to my research. The class that I was struggling with at the undergraduate level was fluid flow. That is one of the core courses in chemical engineering, and I remember leaving it going, “God, thank you and good riddance.”"

"That really got me excited about graduate school and I was attracted to the lab of Dan Hammer, who was interested in understanding how white blood cells — especially neutrophils, which take up pathogens — interact during the body’s inflammation response. I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how to create particles, artificial cells, that could mimic this behavior."

"My academic career now combines all this to try and understand the expression patterns of these cell surface receptors in cardiovascular disease."

"Hans Urs von Balthasar is the only one in our century to have raised the question of the essential “form” of Catholicism, a form that Balthasar finds more often in the works of certain poets or writers than in those of theologians."

"There is a secret in communication: it consists in making oneself invisible through excessive exposure. (p. 13)"

"Be wary, therefore, of those who cry out that the world is neither rational nor moral, because either they are ineffective, that is, they do not know the world, or they are dishonest, that is, they know it too well but in a one-sided way. Between the impotence of having to be (which is not) and the idolatry of the fait accompli (which often only appears to be so), there is a third way, which is precisely that of aesthetics. (p. 67)"

"The purpose of communication is to encourage the elimination of all certainty and to acknowledge an anthropological transformation that has turned the public into a kind of ‘tabula rasa’, extremely sensitive and receptive, but incapable of retaining what is written on it beyond the moment of reception and transmission. (p. 108)"

"It seems that our age has exercised its power precisely on the level of feeling. Therefore, perhaps it could be defined as aesthetic: not because it has a privileged and direct relationship with the arts, but more essentially because its strategic field is neither cognitive nor practical, but that of feeling, of ‘aisthesis’. (p. 3)"

"Apollonian infallibility presupposes self-control: the shot is all the more perfect the steadier the archer's hand, the more devoid of violent emotions his soul. But only those who believe they have succeeded in everything they do succeed in everything: in this annulment of one's hopes, dreams, and past projects, in this complete adherence to the historical world, lies the deepest meaning of Apollonian infallibility, the essential link between Apollo and victory. (p. 98)"

"To love is to give freely, but not harmlessly. It is impossible to explain why its object is one human being and not another; nevertheless, its dynamics were clear to the ancients, who emphasized its strategic aspect. Giving to the lover does not solicit an exchange, but constitutes a challenge. The lover tends not to take something away from the beloved, but to possess them in a sense that, alongside its sexual significance, also has political and military connotations. Eroticism would be a very insipid and vacuous experience if the lover were not exposed to the danger of defeat. (p. 113)"

"Media populism does not build community or togetherness; on the contrary, it maximizes exclusion and rejection. But the excluded and the rejected are no less spectacular than the scandalous and provocative elites! Elitism and populism thus find common ground in the experience of disgust, which has two dimensions that are, at first glance, opposite: on the one hand, it is repulsion, distancing oneself from the contaminant, delimiting a pure sphere; on the other, it is abjection, debasement, and self-degradation, proximity to the impure. (pp. 17-18)"

"‘Politically correct’ is based on claiming the status of victim: weakness is not thought of as something that must be changed into strength, because what matters, what makes strength, is precisely its ostentation. As one critic writes, the essence of ‘politically correct’ culture is complaining, whining; its motto is “don't step on me, I'm fragile” (Hughes 1993). This is a paradoxical strategy, because those who complain claim to win by asserting their “difference,” which consists in suffering. This cannot be transformed into joy, because in doing so the “difference” from the enemy would disappear. (p. 23)"

"Fragmentary experience is in reality an experience of the absolute: it transcends even poetry and only in love does it reveal its true face. Now, the enigma of love in general consists in this: that a single human being, empirically determined, dependent on a thousand accidents, in need of so much help and so ephemeral in his earthly existence, can be seen as something divine and sacred. (p. 110)"

"The public demands that the thinker be someone, provide a sufficiently clear and defined image of himself to be able to circulate in the mass media, flatten himself into a formula, a title, a slogan (to be, for example, the philosopher of simulacrum or transit or enigma), but in doing so, he precludes the possibility of understanding what he is seeking. Because reading, thinking, and writing are not about expressing subjectivity or realizing oneself, but quite the opposite: losing oneself, feeling like a conduit, a passage, a transit for something different and foreign. (p. 48)"

"The philosopher is precisely the one who makes himself nothing in order to listen to the present in all its enigmaticity, the one who silences his own desires, his own disordered affections, his own intimate opinions so as not to place obstacles and misleading screens in the way of understanding the manifestations of history, the one who makes himself a pure conduit, a place of transit, a a “gateway” for phenomena that surprise, disturb, and amaze us because they present themselves in unexpected and unpredictable ways. (p. 51)"

"As long as we think of sexuality in terms of a curve that starts at zero, rises more or less slowly towards the climax of orgasm, then suddenly decreases and returns to the starting point, we remain victims of an attitude that experiences sexual feeling as a more or less long preparation for a very brief climax, destined to plummet to the zero point of a tension-free normality, from which it seems that we have never really moved. (p. 4)"