“If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.”
“To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.”
“We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.”
“In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.”
“Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.”
“A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...”