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"We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was " until my last year at Oundle " anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn't it be the other way around?"
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"Do something very praiseworthy in your youth or in your middle age so that you can spend all your time talking about it in your old age!"
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Personal Development
"I am successful because I did not waste time bothering about what others were doing but focussed on what I was doing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mastery does not exist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Stand tall on the summit after a tedious climb. Take in the remarkable scenery and the exhilaration of accomplishment. But don't pause for long, there are greater mountains to climb while you still possess the drive and capacity to do so."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A successful person's life is made up of a time when he gets out of bed, and a time he goes to bed; and in-between them is filled up with a time that he makes sure something definitely happened!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Greatness is the quality of time converted into production or value."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Don't expect others to hand success to you. Create it - with heart, energy and enterprise - and you'll make it come true."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In our natural world, it is the strongest of the species that claim their space, seek out new territories, explore their surroundings, and learn how to survive and thrive. It is those same qualities that enable us to apply confidence and command to transcend the mediocre and achieve outstanding results."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Having a talent is not all that a matter, bearing noble and lasting fruits with your talent is the real matter."
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Personal Development
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"It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists!"
Religion
"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Wonder
"Evolution never looks to the future."
Nature
"I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology."
Science
"I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me."
Science
"To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham."
Religion
"The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world."
Psychology
"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all."
Religion
"When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through."
Science
“Evil doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to ‘the Christian majority’s private liking.’”
Ethics
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