About
Title: Anathem Authors: Neal Stephenson Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 35 Date: 2025-10-28 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
âNothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.â
Tags:favorite,life,love,perception,strength
âThe mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while itâs true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.â
Tags:perception,religion
Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that âDiaxâs Rakeâ and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.â
Tags:fallacy
People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs.
Tags:needs,priorities
âI always tend to assume thereâs an infinite amount of money out there.â âThere might as well be,â Arsibalt said, âbut most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.â
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy.
Tags:work
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Tags:compromise,negotiation,wisdom
âOur opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,â I said. âWe have a protractor.â
Tags:favorite,perspective,problem_solving
âIt is what you donât expect,â heâd said, âthat most needs looking for.â
Youâre carrying this geometry around in your head that fascinates you. Some would say itâs only a pattern of neurons firing in your brain. But it has an independent reality. And for you, thinking about that reality is an interesting and rewarding way to spend your life.â
Tags:intelligence,introspection
There was the temptation to ponder and philosophize about the relationship between mind and body. But the Lorite in me said it would be a waste of time. More efficient to find a library and read what better thinkers had written on it.
Tags:philosophy,scifi
I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts.
Tags:practice,problem_solving
âSo because words have this remarkable property of possessing specific meanings, we must take care to use the correct ones? Is that a just statement of what you have said, or am I in error?â
Tags:semantics
Another useful function of Apert: to be reminded of how weird we were, and how fortunate to live in a place where we could get away with it.
Tags:perception,perspective
Boredom is a mask that frustration wears.
Tags:boredom,frustration
Barbâs willingness to do things the hard way in the near term was making his advancement toward the long goalâeven though he didnât have oneâswifter and surer than mine had ever been. And now I was advancing in step with him.
âOur brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. Thatâs what a brain is. Thatâs what it is to be conscious.â
Tags:cognition
âThe only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,â Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.
Tags:training
âIdeas are good things to have even if they are old.
âMuch pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.â âYou mean, youâre dead and Iâm alive.â âAbsent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I wonât quibble.â
We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on usâand they didnât like that at all.
Tags:religion,social_construct,society,technology
âBeauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds,â Orolo continued. âYour eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it. But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers. Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world. Donât listen to those who say itâs in the eye of the beholder.â
âLet me explain it in words you can understand, cousin,â Gnel said. âIf the aliens are just a big computer program, Sammann here can shut them down just by flipping one bit. The program wonât even know itâs being sabotaged.â âOnly if it does not have Aboutness,â I cautioned him. âIf itâs capable of understanding that its symbols are about something, then itâll know that Sammann is up to no good.â
The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book.
All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess thatâs why we canât do anything else when weâre sleeping: itâs when we work hardest.
This is how the universe protects herselfâprevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of violating the laws of cause-and-effectâto go back in time and kill your grandfatherââ âYou simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!â said Lodoghir.
To stand here and receive compliments from an attractive young woman was quite pleasant, but it was of a whole lesser order of experience from the continuous finger-in-an-electrical-socket buzz that I experienced during even brief interactions with Ala.
âOur only entertainment is waiting for the next Apertâto see whatâs out there when the gates open. When the answer turns out to be the same crap except dirtier and uglier, what can we do besides sign up for another ten years and see if itâs any different next time?â
He used the occasion to uncork one of his amazing, exasperating sermons, filled with wisdom and upsight and human truths, fettered to a cosmographical scheme that had been blown out of the water four thousand years ago.
This is another way in which your consciousness is forever building counterfactual universes: âif I were standing where the Geometer is, my view of the freckle would be blocked.â Your ability to have empathy with the Geometerâto imagine what it would be like to be someone elseâisnât a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.â
He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them upânot because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.
Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beingsâsomething that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies. This is how we get from a solipsistic worldâone that is perceived by, and real to, only one subjectâto the intersubjective worldâthe one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.â
I had made a mess inside of someone elseâs soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me. Now it was closed. I was the only one who could clean up the mess; but in order to do this I first had to get in there.
âIt is good to doubt it,â Fraa Jad said. âAfter all, the Warden of Heavenâs mistake was failure to doubt. But one must choose the target of oneâs doubt with care.