Quotes from Mark Rowlands

What is most important when the time comes - and it always will - is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf.

In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.

What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.

Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

Cheaters never prosper, we tell ourselves. But the ape in us knows it's not true. Clumsy, untutored, cheats never prosper. They are discovered and suffer the consequences [...]But what we apes despise is the clumsiness of their effort, the ineptness, the gaucherie. The ape in us does not despise the cheating itself; [...]

It is a common misconception — pervasive and tenacious, but a misconception nonetheless — that arses are made for sitting on. It seems, instead, they are made for running.

Para nosotros ningún momento es completo en sí mismo. Cada momento se ve adulterado, empañado por lo que recordamos que ha sido y lo que anticipamos que será. En cada momento de nuestra vida la flecha del tiempo nos mantiene inocentes y moribundos, y por eso creemos que somos superiores a los demás animales.

When you play each point as it comes, or play each delivery on its own merits, you are doing just that: playing. But when the value of each point or delivery becomes instrumental, what you are doing is work.

The key to building distance in the long run is the ability of the mind to lie to the body — and be convincing.

Incluso fui vegetariano estricto durante un tiempo y, moralmente hablando, debería seguir siéndolo: es la única posición moral coherente con respecto a los animales. Sin embargo, aunque no soy tan malo como podría ser, tampoco soy tan bueno como debería.

The function of religion is to make us feel better, by peddling a lie. The function of philosophy, and a carefully chosen birthday card, is to make us feel worse, by telling the truth. And the truth is of course: we get worse.

With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

It is consciousness that brings both suffering and enjoyment to the world.

On every long run that has gone right, there comes a point where thinking stops and thoughts begin.

It is therefore not implausible that there is a connection between the rhythm of the body involved in running and the presence of the brain activity involved in higher cognitive functions.

You choke when your focus switches from the individual point you are playing or delivery you are facing and start worrying about your situation in the wider context of the game — or, indeed, how you fared on previous points or even in previous games.

antidote to choking or the yips is always the same: focus on this moment, this point, this delivery and nothing else.

La culpa no la tiene ninguna de las personas a las que llamo amigos, sino yo. Me falta algo. Y con el paso de los años me he ido dando cuenta poco a poco de que las decisiones que he tomado y la vida que he vivido han sido una respuesta a esa falta. Lo más significativo de mí, supongo, es lo que me falta.

Cortisone is good shit.

In a similar vein, Taoism identifies freedom with wu wei: acting without acting.

A zoologist from another universe, where we can suppose the two laws do not apply, might justifiably classify most earthly fauna as subspecies of worm. We are superstructures built on and around our alimentary canal — on and around the worm that we once were.

Bad things need to be addressed, but good things do not. That is why consciousness will tend to focus on the bad.

The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us — at least in part — and living the life they have helped shape. Sometimes they are not worth remembering. In that case, our most important existential task is to expunge them from the narrative of our lives. But when they are worth remembering, then being someone they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge are not only how we remember them they are how we honour them.

The marathon lane is largely empty, mostly silent: the road of the damned rather than the saved.