1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3170
3171
3172
3173
3174
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 07c3127 | Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in. | individuation journey | James Hillman | |
| 2c87deb | The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? * Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could on.. | Graham Hancock | ||
| 58d63fa | What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago. | James Hillman | ||
| f66df27 | A perfectly happy marriage? There is no such thing. There are strong marriages that can survive problems, but happiness is such a brief condition, interrupted by difficulties and plain, boring routine. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 45aae90 | From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well... | pleasure study | Michel de Montaigne | |
| f7cf526 | What hits you affects you and wakes you up more then what pleases you. | Michel de Montaigne | ||
| 1b2255f | I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned. | Michel Eyquem de Montaigne | ||
| 8701ff8 | The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time s.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| dd4f502 | At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day? | Charles Wheelan | ||
| b566154 | Most economists would concede that, in theory, government has the tools to smooth the business cycle. The problem is that fiscal policy is not made in theory; it's made in Congress. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| a28d02a | In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable. | economics | Charles Wheelan | |
| 6fea2cb | Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. "Don't report a rape," the women are told. "Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn't do anything with it--cops figure that guys is sick." | Amy Hempel | ||
| bca5271 | You will stand in line for snacks behind good clothes on bad bodies, behind the man who is so drunk he has lost his shoes, and so belligerent no one will help him find them. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 5a111bd | Mrs. Linden was beautiful in spirit and in fact. Her wish, she told her daughter, was to be a beautiful woman and surprise people because she was a beautiful woman who was kind. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 691cf0f | There's a quick and easy way to test whether an activity involves skill: ask whether you can lose on purpose. | Michael J. Mauboussin | ||
| 7ebc6f4 | I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to .. | Max Barry | ||
| dea86e0 | Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell. | gratitude librarians readers reading thanks | Max Barry | |
| 100fee4 | In the sciences, looking good was usually a negative. It implied you wasted time on outdoor activities instead of building something useful. Even using hair product or makeup implied misguided priorities. Like you thought how things looked mattered, instead of how they worked. We liked to look at attractive people. We expected it of our movie stars and TV characters. But we did not respect it. We knew physical attractiveness was inversely c.. | Max Barry | ||
| ef68701 | Curl moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers .. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| 5018348 | True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it's a losing battle, they will finalize it rather than have it wrenched from them. Insanity wouldn't permit that type of clarity. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| 64ac6eb | She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their ir.. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| f6eb9a3 | You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| c0cab7c | There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is -- to live, to work. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| cd1c32c | Contempt mates well with pity. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| bfa5cfb | Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a "perpetual motion machine" led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to o.. | Michio Kaku | ||
| c63b348 | It should also be pointed out that some of the strains of smart mice were exceptionally timid compared to normal mice. Some suspect that, if your memory becomes too great, you also remember all the failures and hurts as well, perhaps making you hesitant. So there is also a potential downside to remembering too much. | Michio Kaku | ||
| eef7676 | Just one supernova can temporarily outshine an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 6d5806f | My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings--what we sometimes call "mind"--are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. --CARL SAGAN" | Michio Kaku | ||
| 02d9667 | THE SPLIT-BRAIN PARADOX One way in which this picture, based on the corporate hierarchy of a company, deviates from the actual structure of the brain can be seen in the curious case of split-brain patients. One unusual feature of the brain is that it has two nearly identical halves, or hemispheres, the left and right. Scientists have long wondered why the brain has this unnecessary redundancy, since the brain can operate even if one entire .. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 80c2b59 | There is a cosmic "entanglement" between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web. Entangled particles are somewhat like twins still joined by an umbilical cord (their wave function) which can be light-years across. What happens .. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 45d3ba3 | In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathical.. | communication language telepathy | Michio Kaku | |
| 1d06645 | There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society. | Michio Kaku | ||
| faf1d2a | A plasma is the "fourth state of matter." Solids, liquids, and gases make up the three familiar states of matter, but the most common form of matter in the universe is plasma, a gas of ionized atoms." | Michio Kaku | ||
| 03d87ec | Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the existence of God. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 7fb4cf6 | If God gave Dad Alzheimer's, He's got to understand when Dad forgets what church he belongs to. | church god sad snark | Joanne Fluke | |
| cccb5a7 | As she traveled down the lane between the rows of parked cars, she noticed a conspicuous absence of new or expensive vehicles. Teaching didn't pay well enough for any luxuries, and Hannah thought that was a shame. There was something really wrong with the system when a teacher could make more money flipping burgers at a fast-food chain. | cookies cozy-mystery minnesota recipes | Joanne Fluke | |
| 0f44e61 | I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted--romantically and/or sexually--to people of more than one sex, and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree. | Shiri Eisner | ||
| 4fb1f19 | You're not swimming in glory until you find someone to swim with you. Glory isn't glory if you don't have someone to share it with. It's just pride and bullshit on your own." Unbelievable. Will Jones wasn't only one badass cowboy; he pretty much could have been the love child of John Wayne and Yoda." | Nicole Williams | ||
| 471f47c | Thou - why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thow hast hazel eyes. What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in th.. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 5ba246d | A four-letter alphabet called DNA. | genetics heredity | Matt Ridley | |
| 5a695fc | Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term. | free-will genes stress | Matt Ridley | |
| fa9be41 | At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal. | life | Matt Ridley | |
| b514e90 | people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential--the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b22c743 | The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine. Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, .. | genome | Matt Ridley |