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A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.
As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. 
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
What we see depends mainly on what we look for
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.
Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. 
It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do. 
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.
All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction.
It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others.
There's no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.
Everyone needs to be loved, especially when they do not deserve it.
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry
Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle — the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
The word ‘consciousness’ is a clever trick that we use to keep from thinking about how thinking works. We take a lot of different phenomena and we give them all the same name, and then you think you’ve got it.
We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose.
Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.
Like this gas tank, you are overflowing with preconceptions, full of useless knowledge. You hold many facts and opinions, yet know little of yourself. Before you can learn, you'll have to first empty your tank.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets a R rating, but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?
People will remember not what you said but how you made them feel.
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages.
Someone is being judgmental when their judgments are power-driven, unempathetic, based on their own idiosyncratic values or tastes, overly based on other people’s character, and are closed, shallow, and pessimistic, and ultimately have the consequence of making the other person feel problematically diminished.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we canlearn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.
If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
If I forgot what I have not been, I would forget myself.
The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies?
Good example is half a sermon.
If in this moment I were to go mad, my madness would consist of sitting always with my eyes staring, my mouth open, and my hands between my knees, without laughing or crying, or even moving except for sheer necessity. I haven't the least urge to conceive a desire, not even for death. . . . This is the first time that noia [boredom or spleen] not only presses and tires me but harries and rips like the sharpest pain.
Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Is this true or only clever? 
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.
If you look around at your family and friends, you will see that the happiest people are the ones who don't pretend to know what's right for others and don't try to control anyone but themselves.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. 
Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
We argue so much today about 'democracy' versus 'totalitarianism'. Democracy presupposes intelligence of the masses;* totalitarianism does not to the same degree. But a 'democracy' without intelligence of the masses under modern conditions can be a worse human mess than any dictatorship could be.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
We are in the world as words are in a book. Each generation is like a line, a phrase.
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. 
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.
In truth you owe naught to any man. You owe all to all men.
It seems that cybernetics is many different things to many different people. But this is because of the richness of its conceptual base; and I believe that this is very good, otherwise cybernetics would become a somewhat boring exercise. However, all of those perspectives arise from one central theme; that of circularity. When, perhaps a half century ago, the fecundity of this concept was seen, it was sheer euphoria to philosophize, epistemologize, and theorize about its unifying power and its consequences and rami?cation on various ?elds. While this was going on, something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and, the theoreticians. They began to see themselves more and more as being included in a larger circularity; maybe within the circularity of their family; or that of their society and culture; or even being included in a circularity of cosmic proportions!
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
Life comes at us in waves. We can't predict or control those waves, but we can learn to surf.
The greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
ZEAL: A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.
Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
SWEATER: A garment worn by child when it's mother is feeling chilly.
The hours of your life are the most valuable currency you will ever have. How will you spend them?
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
We human beings are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.
Everything we think and feel (and keep thinking and feeling) creates, deep within, the brain we have.
"Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place." This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.
It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves... for they will never cease to be amused.
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