Behrad > Behrad's Quotes

“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: Breve historia del mañana

“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“High levels of dopamine suppress H&N functioning, so brilliant people are often poor at human relationships. We need H&N empathy to understand what’s going on in other people’s minds, an essential skill for social interaction.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race

“overweight children are more likely to be hit by cars when they’re crossing the street. It’s not because they walk more slowly; it’s because they’re impulsive.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race