James > James's Quotes

“the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.”
― Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Only the most saintly and delusional among us welcomes all pain as challenge, perceives all loss as harsh blessing.”
― Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

“One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“The empty mind is a dominant mind. It can draw other minds into its rhythm, the way a vacuum sucks up dirt or the way the person on the bottom of a seesaw controls the person on the top. When I hear a runner say he “runs his own race,” what I hear is bushido.”
― Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

“Injuries are our best teachers.”
― Scott Jurek, Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

“By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Space, time, and objects might just be aspects of a sensory desktop specific to Homo sapiens. They might not be deep insights into objective truths, just convenient conventions that have evolved to allow us to survive in our niche.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Really tapping into our inner vision and inner child might not make us happier or better adjusted, but it might make us appreciate just how smart we really are.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“if we wish to understand why, as humans, we often act in certain predictable ways (and particularly if there is a desire or need to change these behavioral responses), we can remember our animal heritage and look for the possible releasers that seem to stimulate our fixed-action patterns.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“to know reality (or things as they are than to have not to know and to have few illusions as possible— train my will now”
― Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“feel what I feel within myself—that is trying to become aware of it also what I feel in others not being ashamed of my feeling, thoughts—or ideas realize the thing that they are—”
― Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“Only after Satan had exposed the evil in creation—and, by implication, in the Creator—could honesty and healing begin.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Being blessed has tremendous psychological consequences for us. There are even studies that show that our bodies actually change chemically when we feel valued, praised, and blessed.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Human achievement is based on collective intelligence—the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“the positive Warrior energy destroys only what needs to be destroyed in order for something new and fresh, more alive and more virtuous to appear.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“the threat to good collective outcomes doesn’t come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Archetypes cannot be banished or wished away.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“How well we transform ourselves from men living our lives under the power of Boy psychology to real men guided by the archetypes of Man psychology will have a decisive effect on the outcome of our present world situation.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“It was important to get things right, especially if you were going to make sayings out of them.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaman