Each effort at self-control...

"Unfortunately a vast array of psychological research (Muraven and Baumeister, 2000;Baumeister, 2003) suggests that our ability to use self-control to force our cognitive process to override our emotional reaction is limited. Each effort at self-control reduces the amount available for subsequent self-control efforts."

Hot-cold empathy gaps!

"It is also worth noting that we are very bad at projecting how we will feel under the influence of emotion – a characteristic that psychologists call ‘hot-cold empathy gaps’. That is to say,when we are relaxed and emotion free, we underestimate how we would act under the influence of emotion."

Where thought conflicts with emotion...

...Finally, at even greater levels of intensity, affect can be so powerful as to virtually preclude decision-making. No one ‘decides’ to fall asleep at the wheel, but many people do. Under the influence of intense affective motivation, people often report themselves as being ‘out of control’...As Rita Carter writes in Mapping the Mind, ‘where thought conflicts with emotion, the latter is designed by neural circuitry in our brains to win’.
Camerer et al.(2004)

...more carefully we look at a funny story...

 The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

Nikolai Gogol

All men are bores!

"I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this."
Soren Kierkegaard

You may choose to look the other way!

"You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know."

~ William Wilberforce

...that man doesn't forget to be kind!

The hope in mankind is that man doesn't forget to be kind.

~ Joshua Cintron

A man who fears suffering!

" A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."

~ Michel de Montaigne

Hounds of existence!

You look down, you see your hands, you turn them over, you seek a mirror, touch you face, and ask what am I; the moment of alienation from your normal existence; the moment of separation between the selves. You circle round your self, one self watching the other in jaw-drop amazement. Who is this other guy I been living with? When did they merge and why did they separate now (and you hear the howls of hounds of existence from somewhere dark)? What am I? The question echoes, what am I, you hear the whisper?

The anthem of life!

No matter what you turn yourself into (or get turned into), no matter what you believe you are (have become); during the silence, during those in between moments of solitude; you will hear (become aware) of that whisper, that call; that call to your humanity, your human, fragile existence (it will find a soft spot through your make belief armor), the call to embrace the naked, vulnerable, human, that you have tried to push into the shadows. A sigh of grief, a grief of unexplainable nature, a sigh from the deeper pits of existence would mark that moment, the moment of unease, moment of angst, a moment to face yourself, accept yourself, accept your fear-filled fragility, or to turn away from it, to suppress the calls with everyday noises. But rest assured they will come, the ghosts of inner caves. the banshees, they whisper, one word, again and again, "why" they ask, "why" and that makes you uneasy, the urge to flee, is the call of the instinct. But would you flee or choose to stay and listen; and if so you choose, the banshees, they fade and transform into creatures of pleasantness, and their why's, they turn into the songs of existence, sad and pleasant songs, the anthem of life!

Then life seems almost enchanted after all!

 Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.

Vincent van Gogh

What a circus!

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
 - Charles Bukowski

Treat it as a way to manipulate another person as an object!

"One of the most obvious ways people fail to recognize and honor others is through sex, which is one of the most intimate ways people can have meaningful relationships with others. Many times, people fail to engage in sex as a way of exemplifying the meaningful dimension of a human relationship and instead treat it as a way to manipulate another person as an object (a nonperson)."

In today’s society, it’s taboo!

"As a matter of fact, the way society handles death allows most people to easily avoid the subject until it can’t be put off any longer. Although death is always all around you, binding you, you don’t talk much about it. In today’s society, it’s taboo."

When someone embraces bigotry...

"When someone embraces bigotry, fundamentally he’s really embracing his prejudices rather than rejecting the object of his hatred."

What man accepts with the most difficulty is being judged!

"What man accepts with the most difficulty is being judged. Hence, the attachment to the mother, or the blinded lover, or the love of animals as well."

Albert Camus, Notebooks (1953)

Without a fresh virginity of mind!

“We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.” - Eugène lonesco

Death is the ultimate injustice.

"Death is the ultimate injustice."

It is better to be wrong by killing no one!

It is better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves.
—Albert Camus

The meaning of life is just to be alive!

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” - Alan Watts

When People Walk Away From You, Let Them Go!

When People Walk Away From You, Let Them Go.

Your Destiny Is Never Tied To Anyone Who Leaves You.

It Doesn't Mean They Are Bad People.

It Just Means That Their Part In Your Story Is Over.. !

So immensely complex that...

"Philosophers and academics are always huge fans of anything so immensely complex that no one seems to fully comprehend what it means."

A Lot Of Trouble Would Disappear...

A Lot Of Trouble Would Disappear

If Only People Would Learn To Talk To One Another

Instead Of Talking About One Another .....

It will be lived all the better if it has no meaning!

"It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Rather than go back to his old beliefs!

“Would he not feel like Homer’s Achilles, that he would far sooner ‘be on earth as a hired servant in the house of a landless man’ or endure anything rather than go back to his old beliefs and live in the old way?”
(Republic 515d)

Why do my eyes hurt?

“Why do my eyes hurt?” Neo asks.
“Because you’ve never used them,” Morpheus replies.

...if you’ve never been in a fight?

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

I am the one who splits in the night!

“But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

A man who has become conscious of the absurd...

"There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The meaning of life is...

“The meaning of life is that it ends.” - Franz Kafka

No winter lasts forever!

 No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Hal Borland

What is holy holy because...

“Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?”

We live our lives in chains!

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key.
— THE EAGLES

Watching shadows on the wall!

I tell them that I’m doing fine
Watching shadows on the wall.
— JOHN LENNON

It’s the questions that drive us!

"it’s the questions that drive us"

The most remarkable thing about the Universe might ultimately turn out to be...

“As we have looked more deeply into the structure of the underlying laws of Nature the impression we have is that things are very often simpler than we might have suspected. Just as the most expert computer programmer is the one who can write the shortest program to effect a particular task, so we might expect the Architect of the ultimate program that we call the laws of Nature to be elegantly economical on logic and raw materials. It is a common tendency to think  that  it  would  be  a  hallmark  of  the  Universe's  profundity  if  it  were  unfathomably  complicated,   but  this   is   a   strange  prejudice. This  view  is  motivated  by  the  idea  that  the  Creator  needs  to  be  superhuman—and  what  better  way  to  assert  that  superiority  than  by  incomprehensibility? But why should that be so? Anyone can explain how to assemble a model aircraft in 500 pages of instructions; it is not so easy to do it in 10 lines. Profound simplicity is far more impressive than profound complexity. The  most  remarkable  thing  about the Universe might ultimately turn out to be the very small number of  rules  and  components  required  to  define  it.”

When we talk about the future of human capabilities!

“When  we  talk  about  the  future  of human  capabilities  we  need  not  restrict ourselves  to  that  of unaided  human  investigation. Just  as  we  are  able  to  do  'super'-human tasks by using fast computers, so in the far future we can expect forms of artificial intelligence which will do much more than simply increase the speed of human calculation or the quantity of data that can be assembled and  compared  at  one  time. Ultimately,  the  bulk  of the  scientific  enterprise might  be  pushed  forward  by  forms  of machine  intelligence  that  are  able  to extend human capabilities in both predictable and unpredictable ways.”

Infinite complexity of nature!

"If by the ‘infinite complexity of nature’ is meant only the infinite multiplicity of the phenomena it contains, there is no bar to final success in theory making, since theories are not concerned with particulars as such. So too, if what is meant is only the infinite variety of natural phenomena... that too may be comprehended in a unitary theory... Nor does it help to say that there is indeed a true explanatory theory in some Platonic heaven but that it is infinitely complex and so not to be comprehended by men. For if there can be an infinitely complex proposition, it will certainly not be a single explanatory theory in any ordinary sense of that phrase, but at the best an infinite conjunction of explanatory theories. Perhaps we can  produce successive approximations to  such  a  conjunction,  if there is  nothing else to work for, but in that case our best hope of success will be by steady accumulation  of the  separate  items  than  by perpetual  revolution. "

William Kneale

There are questions which there is no reason to ask!

"At any moment of history, there are not merely questions one can ask but cannot answer, there are questions which there is no reason to ask."

A dealer should not overcharge an inexperienced purchaser!

"For example, it is always a matter of duty that a dealer should not overcharge an inexperienced purchaser, and wherever there is much commerce the prudent tradesman does not overcharge, but keeps a fixed price for everyone,so that a child buys of him as well as any other."
Immanuel Kant

Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure!

“Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek, if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few."
Jeremy Bentham

He who has a why to live for...

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. ”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Sacred and profane!

“I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the account of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane. ’’
~ David Hume

More miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish!

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.”
~ Hume

It is the opium of the people!

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ’’
~ Karl Marx

...there's anything inherently wrong in having fun!

 I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

George Plimpton

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent!

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."
Baruch Spinoza

For every man there exists a bait...

"For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing."
Friedrich Nietzsche

...but whether people have always thought like machines!

“Here the question is not whether we will ever build machines that will think like people but whether people have always thought like machines. ”
~ Sherry Turkle

In the end, that may have been my biggest advantage!

“lf Beep blue can't find a way to win material, attack the king or fulfill one of its other programmed priorities, the computer drifts planlessly and gets into trouble. In the end, that may have been my biggest advantage.”
~ Garry Kasparov (speaking after the 1996 Chess tournament)

One will be able to speak of machines thinking!

“I believe that at the end of  the century the use of word and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. ’’
~ Alan Turing

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority!

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
—The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877

Books may well be the only true magic!

 Books may well be the only true magic.

Alice Hoffman

I usually never get that far in my discussion, of course!

"I usually never get that far in my discussion, of course, because data rarely impress people who have decided in advance that something is wrong with the picture."

A thinking intelligent being!

A person is "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me, essential to it. "
~ John Locke

What am I?

"What am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts,understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses,which also imagines and feels."
~ Rene Descartes

To be conscious...

“To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence”
~ Aristotle

...so far reaches the identity of the person!

"As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of the person."
John Locke

Give me a dozen, healthy infants!

“Give me a dozen, healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, activities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. ’’
~ John B. Watson

Bodies stashed up in the branches as well!

"People  have  been  killing  each  other  ever  since  they  came  down from  the  trees,  and  I wouldn’t  be  surprised  to find  bodies stashed up in the branches as well."

War kills more civilians than soldiers!

"War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war."

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars...!

 The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

William Shakespeare

But while everything is always changing...!

"But while everything is always changing, the change itself creates harmony."

You could not step twice into the same river!

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
~ Heraclitus

Man is condemned to be free!

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy is the microscope of thought!

"Philosophy is the microscope of thought. "
~ Victor Hugo

Philosophy begins in wonder!

"Philosophy begins in wonder. "
~ Plato

Whoever looks into himself as into vast space..

"Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."
Friedrich Nietzsche

What do you matter?

"Every philosopher has probably had a bad hour when he thought: what do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? And then some mischievous little bird flew past him and twittered: "What do you matter? What do you matter?"
Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything that irritates us about others...!

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

~ Carl Jung

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power!

"Ambition is the immoderate desire for power."
Baruch Spinoza

One feels secure by...!

"One feels secure by having an ideal."

Knowledge is the past!

"K: Knowledge is the past.
B: The danger is that we call it the present. The danger is that we call knowledge the present. "

Do I know you?

"The word to know. Do I know you? Or have I known you? I can never say I know you, I mean actually; it would be an abomination to say “I know you”. I have known you. But you in the meantime are changing—there is a great deal of movement going on in you. "

When psychologically I want security!

"Biologically, fragmentation takes place, the insecurity takes place, when psychologically I want security."

Very deeply uncomfortable!

"You see, as long as I don’t ask questions I can feel comfortable. But I feel uncomfortable when I do ask questions, very deeply uncomfortable. Because the whole of my situation is challenged."

Dying of thirst while bathing in a lake!

"Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake."

They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth!

“It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.”
- Alain de Botton

To be almost wholly earth before one dies!

 It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Until you looked deeply into mathematics!

Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed until you looked deeply into  mathematics.
~ CARL SAGAN

I shan’t make you love me any the more!

 Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

Vita Sackville-West