01Undated[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.John Daniel / quote ↗
02UndatedThe whole of Nature is a book, the heavens a scroll; and they were intended to be used as such.John Daniel / quote ↗
03UndatedAt Reed College, I learned very quickly that I didn't know nearly enough. I learned, first, that every student there was as smart as I was, and quite a few seemed smarter.John Daniel / quote ↗
04UndatedDiversity of opinion in religious belief and its mode is not incompatible with equal possession of the essentials of pure faith, nor at variance with the divine purpose. If an analogy exists between the growth we observe in the vegetable kingdom and that of the intellectual, we should expect to find the same variety in the expression of human belief that we seek in the development of tree and flower. Every tree is not an oak, nor every flower a rose, but each tree and flower is the expression in form and colour of its own inner life. In the same manner the mind was intended to be free to develop according to its own light, and any attempt to coerce it into a defined groove is an interference with the natural order of things. To condemn those who in matters of religion do not conform to our standards is, therefore, as unreasonable as to find fault with an oak tree because it is not an elm.John Daniel / quote ↗
