Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions,...

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors...

Some wounds; never reflects on the skin, but kills us slowly from inside.

Çoğu insan Kafka’nın ihtiyarına benzer. Umut ederler ama yüreklerinin sesini, itkisini dinleme ve ona göre davranma yetisinden yoksundurlar; bürokratlar onlara yeşil ışık yakmadığı sürece beklerler de beklerler.

He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the...

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with...

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, “Littlewood’s Miscellany.” He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day,...

Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children… it is the reason that one human being’s intensely personal tests and triumphs can be...

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by...

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.

Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I...

Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn’t quite as spectacular.

Angie: “How do I pitch these ideas to her?”Mira: “From a distance, preferably wearing body armor.

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children...

He’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.

James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you...

Psychological imprisonment was no less uncomfortable than its physical counterpart. In some ways, it was even worse; it provided the illusion of physical freedom, but garnered none of the benefits of it.

What if I said, there was a way

If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of...

SCREW CHILDREN! That’s the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don’t comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with...

I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has...

Presence is to meet another person in meditation. Presence is to invite another person in meditation. It is a meeting in love, joy, acceptance, sincerity, truth, silence and oneness.

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system...

For every quote, there is one that challenges it.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities,...

Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being...

How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo’s claim that the earth was not the center of...

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life?...

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if...

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Patience is a natural consequence of the cultivation of compassion & love, for ourselves and all beings.

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it’s...

As you try to balance between the socialist and capitalist systems in the world, you will come up against the biggest problem facing humanity today. Jung wrote in 1938 “Any large company composed of wholly...

Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of...

To, že na nás božství působí, můžeme konstatovat jen prostřednictvím psyche, přičemž ale nejsme schopni rozlišit, zda tato působení pocházejí od Boha, nebo z nevědomí, tj. nelze stanovit, zda božství a nevědomí jsou dvě různé...

Psychologist: “This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we’re only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, ‘type’ but, ah, rather consider everyone to be their ‘type.'”Gramma:...

However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people’s suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.

Excerpt from my lecture Sunday at Soul-Esteem Center10 Commandments – God knew when he gave us choice some would make the wrong choices, but God wanted his creation, man, to have free will and felt...

When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.

…Aku tak percaya kata-kata ‘biarkan waktu menyembuhkan luka’, omong kosong kalau kau tak berbuat apa pun untuk memperbaikinya.”-Cerita 3: Angela, hal.38-

Poor greedy one, wherever he runs He’s after food, and death is after him.(Saadi)

The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying. It was: ‘What do you think I am, stupid, or something?

We are all capable of becoming something monstrous.

Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving...

Thus, the “memories” that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker’s tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we...