Mark Bao > Mark's Quotes

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“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

“There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.”
― Francis Crick

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Our perception of reality is malleable. Everything is always shifting. We may not have the power to change an event, but we do have the power to change our perspective.”
― Stephanee Killen, Buddha Breaking Up: A Guide to Healing from Heartache & Liberating Your Awesomeness

“There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“from one thing, know ten thousand things”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi