Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur.
Worshipping God is like mining for fossil fuels,” someone argued. “Plenty of smart people know it is shortsighted, and yet they have too much invested to stop!
Any life-form advanced enough to travel light-years through interstellar space would have nothing to learn by probing the rectums of farmers in Kansas.
What had once been life’s quiet moments of solitary reflection – a few minutes alone on a bus, or walking to work, or waiting for an appointment – now felt unbearable, and people impulsively reached for their phones, their earbuds, and their games, unable to fight the addictive pull of technology.
Turkish authorities replied with a simple message: You stole the statue – we’re keeping our foot.
Never interrogate before you disable your prey. A cornered enemy is a deadly enemy. The.
Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom.
No good deed goes unpunished.’ Langdon.
When life is dark, let your heart show you the way.
What truth do these people possess? What proof, damn it! A book of ancient fables? Promises of miracles to come?
But most important... what kind of father can look his own son in the eyes... even after all these years... and not even recognize him!
By the end of the eleventh century,” Edmond said, “the greatest intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali – now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history – wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ’the philosophy of the devil.
If a Creator designed our universe to support life, he did a terrible job. In the vast, vast majority of the cosmos, life would die instantly from lack of atmosphere, gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, and crushing gravitational fields. Believe me, the universe is no Garden of Eden.
If you could throw a switch and randomly kill half the population on earth, would you do it?
Consider this!” Edmond declared. “It took early humans over a million years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few thousand years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple hundred years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered automobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two decades for us to start modifying our own DNA!
We’ve been reading the Bible too literally. We learn that God created us in his image, but it’s not our physical bodies that resemble God, it’s our minds.
No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture’s symbols is a common root of prejudice.
Edmond found it deeply distressing,” Winston continued, “that the human mind has the ability to elevate an obvious fiction to the status of a divine fact, and then feel emboldened to kill in its name. He believed that the universal truths of science could unite people – serving as a rallying point for future generations.
Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci’s little secret, and the reason for Mona Lisa’s knowing smile.
I beg you to remember that wealth without wisdom can often end in disaster.