Going to Knowledge as to War

A discipline of attention is stated here in borrowed voices, because the borrowed voices said it first and said it better. The chapter is a threshold rather than an argument: how one arrives at knowledge determines what knowledge one is capable of receiving.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.

Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else.

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times… What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design.

My course is set for an uncharted sea.