Tag: quotes

So the last year of school has ended, and I am going to start another kind of life. It strikes me as strange, and among the many anxieties that seize me, the strongest is the choice of a future profession. It already preoccupies me and torments me, all the more so because I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything, and I feel I have many different tastes all dominating me thinking one after the other.

Charles Baudelaire, in a letter, qtd. by Rosemary Lloyd (via victoriajoan)

There is no neuron with our lover’s face on it. There are instead a vast number of neurons that, as a stable set of connections, represent our lover. When they are important to us, we concentrate on them, and as we do, the brain increases the neurochemical strengths of their neural connections.

Many things are unimportant to us, or become so. For these things the neurochemical linkages become weaker, and finally the thought dissipates like an abandoned spiderweb. Neurons cut unused and unimportant thoughts by weakening the neurochemical strengths of their connections. Often a vestigial connection is retained, capable of being triggered by a concentrated retracing of its path of creation, starting with the sensory neurons that anchor it.

On the “hard” problem of love – Virtually Human by Martine Rothblatt

So look at the fleeting stars with fleeting eyes, and feel how the earth beneath you gives. It is all a temporary manifestation of particles and it is all unraveling to particulate silence. The bustle of the human day, will come, and will go. And then there will be night. But, how beautiful these moments within the dissolve. What a temporary perfection we can find in this passing world. Everything good, ever done, everything good that was done today; and all the good people doing it. And back, and back, and forward, and forward. All that beauty within a universe unraveling. Be proud of your place in the cosmos. And yet it is. How unlikely. How fantastic. And stupid. And excellent.

cecil making everyone cry