Shawn Boyle

“Galileo’s own description of his ecclesiastical travails is contained in a letter he wrote in the year 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina: Some years ago as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors [many of them ecclesiastics]—as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: “tragically, unvoluntarily, lost.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself. My emotions. My inner storm. The secret engines that drive me. If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggression habit and see what happens.”
― Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears