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Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
know exactly where the world is heading – down.
Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialised.
turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second.
Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary rationality.
intelligence and consciousness are very different things.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger.
If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.
When things really work, everybody adopts them.
a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop.
Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom.
Nations and religions are football clubs on steroids.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it.
what we know and don’t know keeps changing.
very cost of the flag makes the ritual more effective. Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because, of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.
The problem with evil is that in real life, it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful.
The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe.
the real enigma of life is not what happens after you die, but what happens before you die.
