I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.
It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.
The gods we make in our own image are tribal gods. They tell you how very, very little you should tolerate outsiders, who are less favoured of the Lord. Amazingly, there are no recorded cases of the holy man going up the mountain and finding that it's the others who are right. It always turns out that God wants unbelievers to suffer, and what could be more noble than to help him a little? When religion rules, toleration disappears, for you cannot cherish the verdict of death to the infidels, yet also tolerate those who disagree - for those are the very same infidels.
Chance is as relentless as necessity.
This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will.
People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.
Whisper to the flashing water your real name, write your signature in the sand, and shout your identity to the sky until it answers to you in thunder.
To make a muscle grow, you must force it to go beyond its capabilities. The most potent way to apply that force is to train to failure. Training to failure means. . . the muscles are forced to grow stronger and bigger
(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. )
There are no more worlds to conquer!