David Clarance

“All your technical prowess will evaporate if your mind and emotional landscape aren’t solid. My return from Monte Carlo has made one thing clear: I need to recharge.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Take Control and Win

“The laws of nature do not change. If they do, it will be calamitous for the world. Human laws change. Human beings change them. Unable to cope with the change, they get perturbed. Slowly they get used to the change. Once the change stabilizes, they desire change again. Human law becomes the law of the time, and the law of the moment becomes the law of human beings. During the period of transition, the lives of the people who are key to the change go haywire.”
― Volga, The Liberation of Sita

“And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made‑up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition.”
― Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Take Control and Win

“How does one know the true path?’ ‘Not through arguments—they never reach a conclusion; not from teachers—they can only give their opinions; to know the true path one must, in silence and solitude, reflect on one’s own life.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata