Favourite Quotations (Moderator: Frederique)

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts—or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

Started by spiros

The truth is rarely pure and never simple

Started by spiros

When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.

Started by spiros

Ο θάνατος είναι κι αυτός μια περασμένη αφήγηση

Started by spiros

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

Started by spiros

Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

Started by spiros

Ο σωστός δρόμος είναι ο ανήφορος.

Started by spiros

My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.

Started by spiros

Life won't stop for your pauses and procrastinations. It won't stop for your confusion or fear. It will continue right along without you. Whether you play an active part or not, the show will go on.

Started by spiros

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas.

Started by spiros

Children are like wet cement—whatever falls on them makes an impression

Started by spiros

You change your life by doing, not by thinking about doing.

Started by spiros

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

Started by spiros

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.

Started by spiros

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

Started by spiros

Je ne crains pas la mort. C'est l'enjeu de la vie. → I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

Started by spiros