The Substance of All Things Quotes

“I will miss him always and always with all of myself, but only in proportion to having loved him with all of myself, so I cannot wish the loss away, or any of anything away. I”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“I thought that most people made too much noise and it wasted the quiet.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“I consider the substance of all things lost and all things found. And how grief and mourning and anger are the necessary precursors to bravery; the forefathers of courage; the ignition of change. They shake us into what needs to be done if we let them inform us rather than define us,”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“it was the only time I could remember when everyone smiled at the same moment. And then the world resumed, but kinder.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“Always so much to talk about and so little to say, tossing out words like apple cores left to rot by the roadside.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“not everyone truly wants to be healed. Some would rather cling to the identity of their sickness and wouldn’t know who they were without it. And so I moved on to the next person.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“uncovering the source of your pain so you can accept it and place it where it belongs rather than being trapped in what you’ve grown to see yourself as.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“We get to choose whether events inform us or define us. And that can be very hard when there’s great conflict.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“The brain doesn’t understand the passage of time. It doesn’t know how old our trauma is, or how old we are for that matter. We think when we grow up that all this is supposed to sort itself out, but it doesn’t work that way. We are the same people we were, just with more mileage on the clock.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“haphephobia.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“And I knew that when she became gratified she would not look back; she would return to her true self. I am my true self when I am kind I thought. And the difference was”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“I inhaled the foulness of her agony and I relished in it. I could taste her sickness, her need and the urgency of it, begging for the very thing she had contemptuously ridiculed me for only yesterday. And the arrogance. And the hate. And the spit. Everything was her fault. And I was hungry for retribution. It would feel good to say no. She babbled on, but I didn’t hear a word. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be her. To be her son. To tease for the surge of power, the fix, at the expense of another. To be energized in the presence of terror. To know that victory is a foregone conclusion. To feed on fear like cicadas on the leaves of new spring willows. But I would go. I knew in that moment that I could not use my hands to boost myself at a cost to others, wielding power to determine who would and would not be deserving of restoration, of being whole—like the angry God from church that I didn’t believe in. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. I knew I couldn’t be that. And I knew that I would rather be myself with all that I didn’t have, and my loss, and my deformity, than this woman with her money and her status and her spit. For even in the depth of her temporary humility and even humanity, I knew she was colorless inside.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“would be no depression, no suicide, and everyone not subjected to the most dire tragedies would be happy. It’s what people do with their circumstances. That is up to them.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“There is always someone worse off. Always someone who has suffered more. And that doesn’t reduce our own suffering to inconsequential. Otherwise”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“everything is in relationship to our own experience.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“And the need to be accepted because you were special, rather than rejected because you were different, falls in line with that as well.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“It makes perfect sense that you needed to create some sort of fantasy life that was better and brighter than the one you had. It was a coping mechanism.”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things

“That’s what memory is, a fine-tuned linear account that we construct about our past to form our identity,”
― Sam Harris, The Substance of All Things