top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain."
Standard
Customized
More
"If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Flowers are the beautiful hairs of the Mother Spring! Don't pluck them!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The Moon always finds an opportunity to turn our attention from the ground beneath our feet to the sky above our head!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sand by the seashore is inestimable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is spring, let us dance and dream with flowers. Let us sing and enjoy the trees."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully."
Mindfulness
"A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
Empowerment
"Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease."
Philosophy
"Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later."
Religion
"The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat."
Language
"Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it."
Equality
"The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen."
Science
"Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance."
Knowledge
"Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture."
Nature
"Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations."
Education
bottom of page