Patrick McGee > Patrick's Quotes

“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“The less support an idea has,the more fervently it must be believed in, so that a totally preposterous idea requires unflinching faith.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Man has made a discovery ... the way to make life easy is to make it meaningless.”
― Kierkegaard, Soren

“Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Quotable Kierkegaard

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them. “You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire.’ ”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“For example, when articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“For example, the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.). And if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well. If there were a way to fast-forward all the learning (and retention) that actually takes place in school—for example, by giving students a magic pill that taught them everything in an instant—we would still need to subject them to boring lectures and nitpicky tests in order to credential them.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“As Albert Einstein lamented, “It is . . . nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life