The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor – not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition. Stephen Jay Gould
About This Quote

Let’s say you’re a student and you have a test in two weeks. Your friend comes over to study with you and says, “We’re just going to memorize this section. It’ll be easy.” You look at them and say, “No way! That’s impossible. You just can’t memorize that fast!” Your friend replies, “Well, duh, that’s why we have this test.

We need to memorize that section.” And then they continue to explain how they are going to do it, but your mind starts thinking, “What kind of crazy person would memorize a section in two weeks? How could anyone do that? That doesn’t make any sense! It can never be done! How could I ever ask my friends to do something like that? I would never even ask myself…” Suddenly your mind is filled with doubts about whether this person is crazy or not. Why did they come over to study? What was their motive? What were they trying to prove? Why did they share the same information with you without context or explanation?

Source: Bully For Brontosaurus: Reflections In Natural History

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  3. Love is not the absence of logicbut logic examined and recalculatedheated and curved to fitinside the contours of the heart - Tammara Webber
  4. Love is illogical, love had consequences-- I did this to myself, and I should be able to take it. - Marie Lu
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More Quotes By Stephen Jay Gould
  1. We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
  2. We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
  3. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
  4. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
  5. Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way...
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