hairyfigment comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 December 2011 06:01AM

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Comment author: hairyfigment 14 December 2011 12:14:02AM 2 points [-]

After describing an odd subjective experience:

If the rationalist reader has had the quite super-Stylite patience to read to this point, he will surely now at last throw down the book with an ethically justifiable curse.

Yet I beg him to believe that there is a shade of difference between me and a paradox-monger. I am not playing with words -- Lord knows how I wish I could! I find that they play with me! -- I am honestly and soberly trying to set down that which I know, that which I know better than I know anything else in the world, that which so transcends and excels all other experience that I am all on fire to proclaim it.

Yet I fail utterly. I have given my life to the study of the English language; I am supposed by my flatterers to have some little facility of expression, especially, one may agree, in conveying the extremes of thought of all kinds. Yet here I want to burn down the Universe for lack of a language.

-- Aleister Crowley here