Must Quotes (page 309)
We must rest, he told himself, on our confidence in His design. Design was clear enough in the stars, the seasons, in the woods and fields. But in human affairs—? Perhaps our bewilderment came from a fault in our perceptions; we could never see what was behind the next turn of the road.
Willa Cather
For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fianc,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.
Albert Camus
I'm sure I'm not Ada for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine does'nt go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I'm not Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she's she and I'm I, and-oh dear, how puzzling it all is! i'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is tweleve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is-oh dear! I shall never get to tewnty at that rate! However, the Multiplication- Table doesn't signify: let's try geography....
Lewis Carroll
Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed...
Daniel Dennett