Geometry For Ocelots Quotes

Also: Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not.

He said silently and with infinite volume, Mind is only matter that knows it is matter. Matter is only mind that is yet to become mind.

True liberation is through the recognition of one’s unopposable oppressors.

Is there a more opulent society imaginable than one that builds spaceships while its population starves?

The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for. I don’t know is brave. I’ll never know is heroic.

If I asked you in the midst of a tragedy, “Shall I end your suffering and make all well again?” you would answer, “Please do, I beg it.” If instead I asked you after the tragedy, “Are you glad you lived through it? Did you grow wiser from the experience?” you would answer, “Yes! Thank you for not stopping the thing prematurely.” Humans are not to be trusted.

Power is fine. Restraint is better. Technology saves some. Compassion saves all.

Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.

Within a few minutes the gin and beer took hold. Leo’s head became full of warm marmalade and the usual neurotic mental noise had dimmed to a mutter. So this is what the drunks are after, he thought.

With quiet horror I knew then that the great transition in man’s history was not from illiteracy to literacy, nor from ground-bound to spacefaring, but that invisible, unremarked-of moment when the most dangerous threat to man’s existence ceased being nature, and became man himself.

Then what? Damn it, what works?” “Adulthood. Only the wisdom of adulthood. From my spyle friends I’ve heard there is evidence of millions of developing species in the cosmos, many dead, many yet to arise. Some are carbon-based, some are silicon-based, some are gaseous, others distributed across entire solar systems in vast networks of radio intelligence. But there is one thing, one singular pressure imposing upon on them all. Can they learn moderation before extincting themselves?

We don’t seem to dream of a better world much anymore. We were burned so many times by utopian thinking last century that even utopia is a dirty word now. But we must, must, must start dreaming again, dreaming wide and big of a society where no one is trodden on and everyone can eat. Our dignity relies on it. Our descendants will rely on it. Don’t listen to these miserable, jaded fucks who insist that the indignities and inequalities of the current world are just necessary evils. These same bastards would’ve tried to keep feudalism around not a half-millennium ago.

History has already happened. We can’t do a damn thing about it. But we can be better. God, we can be better. I believe, as I hope you do, in a time one day—a while from now, but still attainably close—when the curses of poverty, misery, and death will seem as pointlessly tragic and avoidable as scurvy.  There is a long way to go yet, but we can get there. We can fucking get there. And it will be an honour to get there with you, or at least continue the brave walk towards adulthood our ancestors began millennia ago. Good luck out there and much, much love. Here come the wild twenties. See you on the other side.

We would find wonder in the imponderable majesty of the little, in all of the cells and molecules and atoms and quarks inside one’s body, the beauty of it, the absurdity. That is where we would apprehend the transcendent. And in finding that transcendent, we would at last realise we are but matter, and finally seek to stop conquering more matter.

We started with trying to understand the mechanics of the heavens. We concluded with pleasure cruises and little plastic drinking straws. What had gone wrong? How had we learned to unhear the cosmic music? It was all fact without wonder.

Be kind, and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, please be kind again.

It seemed to him suddenly that self-hate was the result of a misguided attempt to please people one would never meet, and if one did meet such judgemental idiots, one would not respect them nor desire their respect in the first place.

Moderation or self-death,

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy. Why, the house was burning down, but we were so enjoying the glow. . . - Excerpts from The Empirical Sutras of Lady Ursula

I am only wise to the infinite scope of my ignorance

The principal aim of the species will be to build a single great mirror which all will look into, and see only universe looking back.

There is nothing obvious about the picture of the world we have obtained using the scientific method. Molecules, quarks, atoms, billions of stars and galaxies, meat that knows it’s sentient—what is this madness? And, of course, one might ask: is the scientific model of reality not just another kind of magic, another absurd, fanciful delusion? The answer is: yes. However, it also happens to be the only delusion that doesn’t go away when one stops believing in it.

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy.

the realms above space require even more extraordinary technologies. Hisarya murmured, What technologies? Wisdom, the entity said in sad cyan. Self-control. Maturity. The survival of what you call bivnik. The true game of empire is not the subjugation of worlds so they might be collected in a little museum of power, but the cultivation of the wisdom to delay gratification.

The struggle of history is not to determine more efficiently which of our stories are fiction, and which are correct interpretations of reality, but to cease telling stories entirely. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

They ran from world to world, struggling for millennia. In desperation they tried to revert to the old styles of life, became agrarian again, subsistence farming and such, attempting to moderate themselves. But it was too late of course. Once a child has tried chocolate, who could convince him fruit is better? The last of their galactic reserves dwindled, and all that remained was savagery and death.

Dr Tereshkov, stopping bivnik is not a technology problem. It is not a sociological problem. It is a wisdom problem. And wisdom problems do not respond to data, or beatings, or mathematical formalism.

It is my suspicion that the galaxies are drastically distant from one another so they can only be traversed by beings who have already overcome bivnik—by species able to contain their lust for cosmic abasement long enough to resist writing their names on the stars and selling nebulae for advertising space—a kind of evolutionary selection pressure, if you will. Those species that give in to avarice and limitless expansion are doomed to extinction long before gaining the means to leave their galaxy or transcend to the higher-dimensional realms.

You have proof of this?” Leo said. “Yes. There is a plane above Vex that I have glimpsed only once. There are creatures of some kind who inhabit it, unknowable, unfathomable beings. I believe they are the descendants of those few civilisations who learned that dessert need not be eaten after every meal, that on some evenings only one glass of wine is ample, and that a palace may sleep not just a king, but ten thousand

dreaming wide and big of a society where no one is trodden on and everyone can eat. Our dignity relies on it. Our descendants will rely on it. Don’t listen to these miserable, jaded fucks who insist that the indignities and inequalities of the current world are just necessary evils. These same bastards would’ve tried to keep feudalism around not a half-millennium ago.

is without question that we live inside a dream. I do not mean this world is illusory or submissive to one’s will. Rather, you will have noticed that when inside a dream, despite the contorted narrative, and the sudden return of friends long dead, and a crack in the sky—for as long as you are asleep, the logic holds. It is only upon waking that you realise there was no logic to the dream at all. The waking world is no different. Yes, we are familiar with the presentations of light and sound and time. Yes, we are aware that two objects cannot occupy the same space, that eleven is a prime number, and so on. But what is the logic beneath these presentations? What is so self-evident about light or sound or time? The answer is: nothing.

The world is not comprehensible. It is only that we have been asleep so long its incomprehensibility has become familiar. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

There it was then. I would build a scientific religion, a religious science. I would reinvigorate man’s interest in the stars via spirituality. By chapel and telescope I would show reality in its nakedness, and convince the people of the Myriad of Man that we are but universe experiencing itself. At last we would look into the mirror of Being, and see only Universe looking back. “We would find wonder in the imponderable majesty of the little, in all of the cells and molecules and atoms and quarks inside one’s body, the beauty of it, the absurdity. That is where we would apprehend the transcendent. And in finding that transcendent, we would at last realise we are but matter, and finally seek to stop conquering more matter. The way out was not up, to some holy, blazing firmament, but down, into the skin, into the quiet absurdity of being.

Quieter: “I choose to believe even those enigmatic higher-dimensional creatures I spied, even the beings above them, have not seen Nature’s true face—even they are no closer than us to understanding what reality is doing here, else they would have descended to tell the Truth in a manner we might understand, and no one would die ignorant ever again. So, whatever happens next, allow yourself to be warmed, if only for a minute, by the knowledge that not even the gods know what dirt is doing here.

The world may be a story, but the plot delivers no catharsis, and the moral the story is trying to get across is far from obvious.

I think we like telling stories because for as long as we listen to them, we can forget that the world is harsh and unpredictable, and that history is driving heavily, heavily under the influence. And maybe it’s trying to drive somewhere with good intentions, but more often than not, falls asleep and swerves into an orphanage. Our respective nation’s histories are no different. Our personal histories are no different. But

Bolstered by doomsday weapons and an internet that can no longer agree on a consensus narrative regarding just about anything, the 2020s may well be the defining decade of our species. As in, this could well be make-or-break time. And if you are being told again and again that humans have to starve to keep the machine going, that the current indignities are just a necessary quirk of the system, that we will only survive if we preserve the status quo, then I would like to leave you with a paraphrasing of something my hero Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech shortly before she died:

The reaches of the current system may seem inescapable at the moment. Well so was the divine rite of kings not too long ago.

It was decided that limiting the Union’s growth because of bivnik was anti-Devan, tantamount to a condemnation of our nature. Instead, we would innovate our way out via some technology yet to be discovered.” “Fantastic,” Leo said. “Give Hisarya a few

there may still be some hope of turning the tide of bivnik before it is too late. Show them how the walls of paradise are crumbling. When the barrier to the right course of action is low enough, most folk will do the right thing.

It wasn’t the poor who revolted. It wasn’t the rich who overran everything. It was the fat, satisfied middle class, and their fat, satisfied kids. There was no revolution. There was only the promise that revolutions would never happen again and everyone could carve out a comfy little space for themselves and talk to their fridge and own a crystal communicator if they only turned a blind eye to the end of the world. The kids tried candy, and then candy was all they wanted.

There would be no reason or compassion without religion.” “Nonsense, sir,” Marta said. “I choose not to harm because I know what it is to be harmed, and I’d rather not inflict it on my kin or friends or society. I don’t have to be commanded to do so. I choose to. If I behaved well just because I’d been told to, with the threat of hell or what have you, that isn’t really good behaviour at all, but a celestial hostage situation.

Biological evolution wasn’t a pleasant prospect for the ancients to come around to. Many did everything they could to deny the evidence at first, but there it was—we came from dirt. In time, we incorporated those new and difficult findings into our worldviews, tempered our egos. Later we were better for it, much like a child eventually accepting the hard edges of the world so as not to injure herself so badly on the next occasion.” Mriga said, “Very noble, madam. Spoken like a true champion of reason. The only problem, of course, is that no one would choose to live under such a dark, abyssal narrative as yours. You have no answers, only vapid questions. What is the point of life? How best to live? Where do we go when we die? You only inject doubt where Bodhi has certainty. Tell me, where do you think the night sky came from, Dr Tereshkova? You have no explanation for why there’s anything here at all.” Marta groaned, “And neither do you in the slightest, the only difference being that Gearheart

is honest enough to admit that. I’m sorry if ignorance scares you. I’m sorry if you can’t stand the thought of dying before you’ve found the meta-yes. But that’s how this works, for now. And in the meantime, bookended by birth and death, riding about in bodies of carbon, loving, suffering, striving, for a short, short time, we get to be. If we’re forced to be in a mysterious universe, and that universe is mute on the subject of its own motivations for existing, I’ll still take living in honest ignorance over your metaphysical posturing any day. That’s real bravery. Not concocting blatantly contradictory stories to comfort oneself, not appealing to the vague transcendent every time you get your worldview in a twist. Ignorance. Brave, honest admission of one’s ignorance, and living with that ignorance in a kind, compassionate manner, treating each other well even if we know we eventually all go to dust and never happen again. We must try to be wise, to be good women, to be good men. The rite of adulthood is the admission

of ignorance, not the proliferation of fabricated stories to assuage our existential fears.

Lord Mriga, we may be living in the last days of galactic civilisation. You can posture all you like and call the bivnik models wrong, or claim Anaximander will save us, or whatever suits you, but we won’t stand for it. The mark of a society’s stupidity is the degree to which it believes its own myths. But I’ll tell you what’s better than myths, better than narratives, better than turning ourselves into animals and walking through fourspace just to stave off the knowledge that we’ll still all go to ashes one day. Metaphysical maturity. The recognition that this is our galaxy, these are our stars, these are our citizens, and our children. The price of having these things is taking responsibility for them. If we keep peddling propaganda about our divine right to exploit resources in the name of some Great Above despite the obvious drawbacks of such behaviour, then all the suns will burn out long before we achieve even a scrap

The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for.

It is without question that we live inside a dream. I do not mean this world is illusory or submissive to one’s will. Rather, you will have noticed that when inside a dream, despite the contorted narrative, and the sudden return of friends long dead, and a crack in the sky—for as long as you are asleep, the logic holds. It is only upon waking that you realise there was no logic to the dream at all. The waking world is no different. Yes, we are familiar with the presentations of light and sound and time. Yes, we are aware that two objects cannot occupy the same space, that eleven is a prime number, and so on. But what is the logic beneath these presentations? What is so self-evident about light or sound or time? The answer is: nothing. The world is not comprehensible. It is only that we have been asleep so long its incomprehensibility has become familiar.

Urinating one morning he became transfixed with an intricate pattern on the plaster of the toilet and mangled the tip of his penis in his trouser zip. Such is the path to enlightenment.

You will think nothing can pull you out and back onto solid land. You'll be wrong through. You can, all by yourself. You have everything you need, right there in your clever head and your bottomless heart.