Michael Espero

“Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment, X.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

“The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let’s substitute the term “evil” with the term “empathy erosion.” Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“In an integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others. In”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age