Individual asexual organisms die by mistake – when the run out of something, or when they experience a lethal accident. Sexual organisms are designed to die, preprogrammed to do so. Death serves as a poignant reminder of our limitations and frailties – and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live.
You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. EPICTETUS, Roman philosopher and former slave, Discourses.
In a world in transition, students and teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill – learning how to learn.
My favorite color: “A pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam...
Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science – pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake – is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what’s been discovered lately.
There’s a certain discipline involved. We can’t just go off shouting ‘little green men’ every time we detect something we don’t at first understand, because we’re going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It’s permitted to not be sure.
We are made of stellar ash.
Writing is perhaps the greatest human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.
We are, each of us, a multitude.
And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much.
It is therefore impossible that reason not previously instructed should imagine anything other than that the Earth is a kind of vast house with the vault of the sky placed on top of it;.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.
Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth.
El secreto, con pocas excepciones, es profundamente incompatible con la democracia y la ciencia.
Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us.
Can we, who have made such a mess of this world, be trusted with others?
The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.
Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.
Los demonios venden; los bromistas son aburridos y de mal gusto.