Nobody should be entirely defined by one thing
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.
In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.
My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the wood stove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick. " That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.
Pools of sorrow waves of joy are drifting thorough my open mind possessing and caressing m
Hidden paths can't be walked without moving obstacles.
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy. . . It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.