Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE YOU!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“If you stop trying to make yourself more than you are, out of fear that you are less than you are, whoever you really are will be a lot lighter and happier and easier to live with, too.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“There are no good men in this game.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.”
― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.”
― Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.”
― Sam Harris, Lying

“Ignorance is only bliss if you want to get caught.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vengeful

“look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are - Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it.”
― Peter Singer

“Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.”
― Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
― Peter Singer

“If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.”
― Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft