My own sense is that the acquisition of self knowledge has been made difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the...
His wife was approximately a hundred years younger than him
You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance-to confine its own....
But just because you have silenced a memory does not mean you are free of it.
When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.
What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or...
To apply general tools to specific problems is to fail.
What is the benefit of the mind in a unreasonable world
Death begins with memory, and the death of memory is the harshest types of death.
If a piece ofknotted string can unleash the wind and if a drowned man can awaken... then I believe a broken man can heal.
At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job.
Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.
The ruling is a science, experience, and powerlessness, imprisonment, or arrest
Things grow quickly are often more easily destroyed than those which take a long time.
Given our abundance, the burden of proof should always be on keeping, not giving. Why would you not give? We err by beginning with the assumption that we should keep or spend the money God entrusts to...
Love is love, and in its presence all opposing forces vanish in the blink of an eye.
They always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, 'You know, I deserve this.' Never happens.
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly...
Even if you don't believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their...
Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.
In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times-it was so normal, so much the regular order...
The system didn't screw you. The system revealed you.
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary...
It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.
Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company....
You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.
He prays because he knows he doesn't control it. He's at the mercy of it.
Human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat
Don't be excessively judgmental, if you like, but always–always–be prepared to make a judgment. Otherwise you'll go through life not really knowing what you mean.
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
