Eduardo Da > Eduardo's Quotes

“The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“You must learn not what people round you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men

“And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. They lie all the time, both to themselves and to others.”
― Pyotr Uspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

“In order to destroy the lies in oneself as well as lies told unconsciously to others, 'buffers' must be destroyed. But then a man cannot live without 'buffers'. 'Buffers' automatically control a man's actions, words, thoughts, and feelings. If 'buffers' were to be destroyed all control would disappear. A man cannot exist without control even though it is only automatic control. Only a man who possesses will, that is, conscious control, can live without 'buffers'. Consequently, if a man begins to destroy 'buffers' within himself he must at the same time develop a will.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

“Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today. Quite the reverse, if a man did nothing yesterday, no demands are made upon him today; if he did anything yesterday, it means that he must do more today. This certainly does not mean that it is better to do nothing. Whoever does nothing receives nothing”
― P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

“We do not imagine that the "masses" may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

“The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Don’t give up on books. They feel so good—their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding what our hands are touching, is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: Breve historia del mañana

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

“To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

“Wealth, for example, is fat-tailed. At the time of writing, the wealthiest person in the world is 3,134,707 times wealthier than the average person. If human height followed the same distribution as human wealth, the tallest person in the world would not be 1.6 times taller than the average person; he would be 3,311 miles (5,329 kilometers) tall, meaning that his head would be thirteen times farther into outer space than the International Space Station.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist