User Profile

"Rainy Etude" by Leonid Aframov

Obligatory autobiographical blurb:

I'm a Ph.D. student in analytical chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to science, I like philosophy, literature, chess, lifting heavy weights, absurdism, beer, movies, and metal. What can I say? I'm a simple guy.

Quotations I like:

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. — Elbert Hubbard

Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. — Søren Kierkegaard

Gluttony is the dominant vice only of people who feel nothing. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. — Baruch Spinoza

Hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves. — J.G.C. Brainard

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. — Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. — Wilde

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. — William James

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way - not at all or in an interesting manner. — Nietzsche

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands upon himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting. — e. e. cummings

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness. — Immanuel Kant

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know. — Epicurus

Most people have lived sheltered lives and are, largely for that reason, parochial and chauvinistic in their attitudes. They think that what they believe is true primarily because most of those around them also believe it. This is baseless as well as irresponsible. — Owen Flanagan

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. — H.L. Mencken

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously. — Mencken

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. — David Hume

If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair. — Thomas Nagel

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and yet he makes gods by the dozen. — Michel de Montaigne

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. — Plato

Disinterests:

das Man, gender roles/stereotypes, dogmatism, overzealous ideologues, people who don't re-rack weights in the gym, the spirit of gravity, social conservatism, the overcoming procrastination book i have yet to read, homophobia, sexism, racism, intellectual dishonesty, anti-intellectualism, ayn rand, objectivism, free market worship, the bush administration, the discovery institute, intelligent design, divine command theory, natural law ethics, natural theology, guilt-based morality, alvin plantinga, people who think jesus would have voted republican, i mean seriously people did you even read the new testament, scientists who mock philosophy, philosophers who mock science, the doctrine of hell, organic chemistry, why can't you be more like your brother?