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During his life, the witcher had met thieves who looked like town councillors, councillors who looked like beggars, harlots who looked like princesses, princesses who looked like calving cows, and kings who looked like thieves.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

Do not seek for reasons in the specific patterns of stars, or of other scattered arrangements of objects; look, instead, for a deeper universal order in the way that things behave.

Implement now, perfect later.

...the entire physical world is depicted as being governed according to mathematical laws. We shall be seeing in later chapters that there is powerful (but incomplete) evidence in support of this contention. On this view, everything in the physical universe is indeed governed in completely precise detail by mathematical principles — perhaps by equations, such as those we shall be learning about in chapters to follow, or perhaps by some future mathematical notions fundamentally different from those which we would today label by the term ‘equations’. If this is right, then even our own physical actions would be entirely subject to such ultimate mathematical control, where ‘control’ might still allow for some random behaviour governed by strict probabilistic principles.

It is quite likely that the 21st century will reveal even more wonderful insights than those that we have been blessed with in the 20th. But for this to happen, we shall need powerful new ideas, which will take us in directions significantly different from those currently being pursued. Perhaps what we mainly need is some subtle change in perspective—something that we all have missed....

We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained

in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic:

Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic,

None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

We Call Them the Brave

who likely were reluctant to be brave.

What of it? We call them brave

perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come

when no one will fight for anything

and there's nothing of worth to save.

Some speak of things we know, as new;

And you, of things unknown as things forgot.

Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn,

One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."