Latest Quotes

“On February 8, 2009, at 12:30am, Chris Brown beat Rihanna’s face into a landscape of craters and bruises. This is the architecture of violence. Later, Chris Brown described their relationship as being similar to Romeo and Juliet’s. In 2013, David O. Russell groped his niece’s breasts and claimed she…”

— Meggie Royer, It’s Time to Stop Forgiving Our Male Heroes

“A synthesis — an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea — is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great a…”

— Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpretin…”

— Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point

“Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life. Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why hav…”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

“I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.”

— John Steinbeck, Travels Withou

“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”

— Cheryl Strayed, Wild

“There are some places so beautiful that just being there feels like falling in love. The further this road stretches away from anything manmade, the prettier everything gets. Little cotton-ball clouds cling tight to the green hills when we arrive at our red cabin near dusk.”

— Jim Goad, Potatoes on the Moon: I Spent a Week Probing the Alien Landscape of Idaho

“In all these things — in the choice of nutrition, of climate and locality, of recreation — an instinct of self-preservation is in command, expressing itself most unambiguously as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one — first act of pruden…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“The influence of climate on the metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration goes so far that a mistake in climate or locality may not only alienate a person from his task, it can withhold him from it altogether: he never gets a look at it.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce

“Sit as little as possible; give credence to no thought that is not born in the open air and accompanied by free movement — in which the muscles do not also celebrate a feast.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

— Paulo Coelho, Brida

“No one can lose sight of what he desires. Even if there are moments when he believes the world and the others are stronger. The secret is this: do not surrender.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain

“Sadness does not last forever when we walk in the direction of that which we always desired.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain

“Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.”

— John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir,

“You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. Slowly, I began to realize that I could not go back and force things to…”

— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

“Freedom continues to be the thing I prize most in the world. Of course, this has led me to drink wines I did not like, to do things I should not have done and which I will not do again; it has left scars on my body and on my soul, it has meant hurting certain people, although I have since asked thei…”

— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

“The energy of hatred won't get you anywhere; but the energy of forgiveness, which reveals itself through love, will transform your life in a positive way.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Zahi