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“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
— Harry Frankfurt (On Bullshit, pp. 55-56)
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Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270.
“It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly
than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for
what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent
enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he
acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no
animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the
rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its
transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd
and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for
example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction.
Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the
same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies.
Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the
feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous
folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as
yet, intelligent enough.”—Aldous Huxley
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“This is how we go on: One day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time… We say yes, I agree that the clouds often look like other things–fish and unicorns and men on horseback– but they are really only clouds. Even when lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”
— Stephen King
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The sun and moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and
the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to
Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded
with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the
thoughts, because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other
side of the visible. But now his thoughts lingered on this side; he saw
and recognized the visible and he sought his place in this world. He did
not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was
beautiful when looked at in this way—without any seeking, so simple, so
childlike. The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore,
the forest and the rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and
the butterfly were beautiful. It was beautiful and pleasant to go
through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned
with the immediate, without any distrust. …All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never
present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw
light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.—Siddhartha (novel) pp. 45-46 by Hermann Hesse