A little lectionary: Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose. — Kierkegaard The world has become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. — Nietzsche A man’s vision is the great thing about him. Who cares for Carlyle’s reasons, or Schopenhauer’s, or Spencer’s? A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberatively adopted reactions of human characters upon it. — WilliamJames The anarchy of the philosophic systems is one of the most effective reasons for continually renewed skepticism. Historical consciousness of the limitless variety of philosophic systems contradicts the claims of each of them makes to universal validity and this supports the skeptical spirit more powerfully than any systematic argument. — Dilthey Worldviews can engage in controversy, but only rigorous knowledge can decide, and its decision bears the stamp of eternity. — Husserl The ever more exclusive rooting of the interpretation of the world in anthropology which has set in since the eighteenth century finds expression in the fact that man’s fundamental relation to beings as a whole is defined as a worldview. It is since then that this term has entered common usage. As soon as the world becomes picture the position of man is conceived as a worldview. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. — Heidegger From the father the child has a right to demand a view of life, that the father really has a view of life. — Kierkegaard If I want to have a worldview, then I must view the world. I must establish the facts. The smallest fact from the connection between the soul and hormonal balance gives me more perspectives than an idealistic system. But the facts are not finished, they are hardly even begun. A worldview that waits for facts believes in progress. — Musil The schoolboy believes his teacher and his schoolbooks. — Wittgenstein The most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. — Chesterton Lavoisier makes experiments with substances in his laboratory and now he concludes that this and that takes place when there is burning. He does not say that it might happen otherwise another time. He has got hold of a definite world-picture — not of course one that he invented: he learned it as a child. I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for his research and as such goes unmentioned. — Wittgenstein Principles, guidelines, models, and limitations are storehouses of energy. — Musil A person, to be a person, must have a worldview. — The Cheeseman 
man when the cheeseman unexpectedly addressed those words to me. The setting was completely unphilosophical. The words from across the counter startled me: was it possible not to have a worldview? Certainly not where we were, where I was growing up, which was a thicket of convictions. I was raised in a neighborhood of verities, Brooklyn, New York 11235. The streets flowed with answers. I was always already in possession of a worldview and could not even picture the emptiness of the opposite condition. I never met a nihilist. The worldview that held me in its grip, sometimes too tightly, was not anything that I had chosen: I was born into it and was systematically schooled in it. We are all born into a worldview; we receive it, we do not invent it; we are not Prometheans who begin ex nihilo and operatically create the terms of our selves and our world. The most pressing business for a thinking mind is what to do about what it already believes. Credence must be earned by more than fidelity, which is not an intellectual virtue. The intellectual melodrama of my youth was whether I could find a way to assent to what had been bequeathed to me, to accept it not only as mine but also as true. Would I want it to be mine if it was false? I have intense feelings of affection for what my ancestors believed, because they believed it and I am their son, and for what their beliefs, true or false, enabled them to achieve (a belief system need not be true to issue in beauty and goodness, or to strengthen the spirit under duress); but neither filial duty nor the stewardship of tradition requires that we adopt the errors or the illusions of those who preceded us. The vindication of a worldview that we did not elect must be accomplished in a manner that is spiritually richer than a mere reconciliation with facts, with the accidentals of one’s birth. Decades later I came to cherish this sentence at the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed: “certainty should not come to you by accident.” Accident had to be elevated into necessity, which could then be celebrated as luck. But I was taught to begin with the feeling of luck, which had the unpleasant implication that everyone who was unlike me was unlucky, when of course they all ardently believed in their own luck, too. Chosenness, specialness, distinctiveness, uniqueness: irony does not flourish in the hothouses of self-love. In their insistence upon our own possession of the only truth, my rabbis outwitted themselves: their confidence about truth was designed to unburden us of the obligation, or the need, for a critical examination of
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence