Erisa

“It's the same with the wounds in our heart. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wound continues to cause us pain. Sometimes for a very long time. We're all going to get hurt. That's just the way it is. But here's the trick about the things that hurt us and cause us pain–they also serve an amazing purpose. When our hearts are wounded that's when they open. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations. That's why you have to embrace each and every difficult thing in your life.”
― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

“One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events) self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a new level of organization on the macro level.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain