Sameer Chandra > Sameer's Quotes

“Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. —BEN OKRI”
― F.S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

“There is no such thing as just a story. A story is always charged with meaning...And we can be sure that if we know a story well enough to tell it, it carries meaning for us. —ROBERT FULFORD”
― F.S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

“The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory — of this there is no doubt.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can’t see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works