“Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything – evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing – it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. W…”— Michael Crichton, amazon.com
“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also take…”— Mark Epstein, amazon.com
“We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”— J.B. Priestley, amazon.com
“How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so t…”— Jonah Lehrer, amazon.com
“The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bod…”— Alexandra Katehakis, amazon.com
“I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the Earth, I see architects and earthquakes, empaths and robots, fictions and near misses, lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming.I see us trying on ways of being – so sweet and messy, so worthwhile.”— Laurie Perez, goodreads.com
“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so importan…”— Joshua Foer, amazon.com
“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies,…”— Irvin D. Yalom, amazon.com
“Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.”— Marshall B. Rosenberg, amazon.com
“We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”— Thomas Hardy, amazon.com
“The theory of linguistic relativity posits that language itself — the specific tongue that we happen to speak — shapes our thoughts and perceptions. Those who believe in linguistic determinism, the strictest version, might argue that a culture that lacks a term for a certain emotion — a particular s…”— Emily Anthes, John Cassidy, newyorker.com
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the co…”— Frantz Fanon, amazon.com
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”— C.G. Jung, amazon.com
“If you’re an artist there are always new modes of expression, new things to create and communicate. The world isn’t fixed, it’s always changing, so that means you have to create anew in light of the changes... I don’t think any good scientist thinks one day science will come to an end. Science is ab…”— Olivia Goldhill, qz.com
“Neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp argues that of seven core instincts in the human brain (anger, fear, panic-grief, maternal care, pleasure/lust, play, and seeking), seeking is the most important. All mammals have this seeking system, says Panskepp, wherein dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to reward a…”— Olivia Goldhill, qz.com
“I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.”— Thomas Love Peacock, amazon.com
“For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.”— Eric Roth, amazon.com
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after a…”— Rainer Maria Rilke, amazon.com