“Too many of the days when I record nothing in this notebook are days of despair. I know — one mustn’t let oneself go. And besides, we keep on living. We live out of habit, if that is living. We hold on, we last. But submerged by solitude and sorrow, overwhelmed by the very awareness of our own impotence. We have no temptations, no desires. Very rarely, a thought dares to spread its wings. It sinks as soon as it rises. What’s the use? The snow has melted in Paris; there’s a thaw. We merely think we’re going to be a little less cold.”

“My recourse, my refuge, is my profession. I work hard at it, I wear myself out at it, I lose myself in it. I give to it all the taste for perfection of which I am capable. I only find a bit of freshness in front of those fifty young men, my students. At the door of the lycée, before going in, I stand up straight, out of consideration for the judgment of others. My students are waiting for me in the classroom. I walk in, and immediately I am sure that all the misfortunes of this country are temporary. The hope that is merely an act of the will for me is organic, as it were, in these young men. When they offered me their season’s greetings three weeks ago, they wished me: ‘Think spring’ [Alain]. But as for them, they live spring. Nothing will prevent spring from blossoming again. So I try to describe Racine’s reverie or Pascal’s torment to them. We forget together, and for a few moments it really seems that modern idiocy has been utterly abolished.” (Jean Guéhenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“When I look back on my early way in science, on the problems I studied, on the papers I published — and even more, perhaps, on those things that never got into print — I notice a freedom of movement, a lack of guild-imposed narrowness, whose existence in my youth I myself, as I write this, had almost forgotten. The world of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconceivable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, ‘in depth,’ the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great scientists of the past could not have arisen, that, in fact, most sciences could not have been founded, if the present utility-drunk and goal-directed attitude had prevailed. It is clear that to meditate on the whole of nature, or even on the whole of living nature, is not a road that the natural sciences could long have traveled. This is the way of the poet, the philosopher, the seer. A division of labor had to take place. But the overfragmentation of the vision of nature — or actually its complete disappearance among the majority of scientists — has created a Humpty-Dumpty world that must become increasingly unmanageable as more and tinier pieces are broken off, ‘for closer inspection,’ from the continuum of nature. The consequence of the excessive specialization, which often brings us news that nobody cares to hear, has been that in revisiting a field with which one had been very familiar, say, ten or twenty years earlier, one feels like an intruder in one’s own bathroom, with twenty-four grim experts sharing the tub.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1978, Heraclitean Fire)

“When news of atrocities being perpetrated are dispensed in small homeopathic doses, one becomes inured, for the normal human mind is not capable of the sort of integration that would raise the misdeed in its full abominable flesh. For that, the flame of an Isaiah is required or a religious genius of the intensity of Kierkegaard, of whom I once wrote as follows: ‘It is the privilege of the great religious thinker to predict the impending Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, the coming slaughter of the millions of innocents, after reading some newspaper gossip about what Frøken Gusta said last night in a theater box to Frue Waller.’ In the absence of Biblical prophets, however, the reading of such writers as Kierkegaard, Kraus, Kafka, or Bernanos may help; that is, if you take them seriously, which is something very difficult to accomplish in our light-minded time.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1978, Heraclitean Fire)

“I am a good listener and a good hearer: I understand at once, and clearly. But usually I only know the right answer later. And so, with certain exceptions, I am not cut out for discussion, and least of all for conversation. I can very well remember that one of the most painful experiences of my youth was when I had the absolutely certain feeling that an assertion made by someone was false, and I could offer nothing in reply, or only the most ridiculously inadequate reply, because my tongue was paralysed by my inarticulate thoughts. On the other hand it was this very impotence to answer on the spot which occasioned my endeavours to attain clarity, and to break up the solid rock of my feeling of certainty, to carve out of it logical arguments.” (Theodor Haecker, 1950, Journal in the Night)

“The man who acts at once, on first thoughts, will make many mistakes, both in theory and in practice; it is seldom that first thoughts are best, though then indeed in quite a different degree when it is a matter of doing something good. One should do it on the spot! The man who acts on second thoughts, the careful man, lives more securely; he will have fewer disappointments. Second thoughts can of course include an indefinite number of thoughts. Decision really lies then, in the third thought, that outweighs all the others, the first and the second. And so right living implies three thoughts. Might they not be distinguished by the fact that first and second thoughts are almost always ‘inspired’, and only the third follows upon a conscious, logical judgment? Far from it, the third thought may well be ‘inspired’.” (Theodor Haecker, 1950, Journal in the Night)

“A clean and tidy classification which awakens a sense of completeness and of a proper emphasis upon the individual parts, is an intellectual pleasure, though it must not be allowed to cloak the danger of arbitrariness and subjectivism. How difficult it is, in fact, to interpret in any detail, even the most certain, universally valid, objective classifications of being, life and death for example, good and evil, ugly and beautiful, will, reason and feeling! How almost impossible it is to penetrate their inter- relationship!” (Theodor Haecker, 1950, Journal in the Night)

“Man, it seems, is not equal to setting up a just social order on his own. He is hardly able even to perceive the two principles upon which he has to build, namely that men are equal and unequal, and consequently that he must be true to both principles. As a rule he prefers the easier way and takes only one as his starting point: either equality, or inequality. The result of this one-sidedness is always a catastrophe. But even if the necessity and the validity of both principles are recognised theoretically (and this is still far from being the case) the immeasurable difficulty only begins in applying the principles in practice. And I am of the opinion that at this point man cannot, of his own strength, reach a satisfactory conclusion. He needs illumination, the immediate help of God in prayer and in leadership.” (Theodor Haecker, 1950, Journal in the Night)

“– What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don’t doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else; — long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table)

“– What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Babbage’s] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table)

“In the light of this description the analogy so passively received nowadays, of the mind as computer, is manifestly fallacious. A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to ‘know’ — bits of information all cast in the digital mode — has no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and the program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority. Homer nods, Shakespeare writes twaddle, Newton makes mistakes, you and I have been known to talk nonsense. But they and we can (as the phrase goes) surpass ourselves, invent, discover, create. The late John von Neumann, mathematician, logician, and inventor of game theory, would not allow one to liken the mind to a computer. He knew how his mind worked and he understood his computer. So goodbye to all the bright remarks, in fiction and conversation, about programming oneself to pass an interview.” (Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James)

“The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in — at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason — so it seems to me — relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass… You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.” (Freud, 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams)