You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, “What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?”
These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them.
You go talk to 12th graders and there’s none of that. They’ve become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade.
— Carl Sagan
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
- Edward O. Wilson
There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they’d been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.
- Andrea Levy
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
- Bertrand Russell
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
- Jonathan Haidt
“Run your own race, as in: you set certain standards for yourself, and you focus on meeting them. When you meet them, you’re proud of yourself. When you don’t, you urge yourself to try harder. You don’t question your standards based on what anyone else is doing. You don’t look over at someone else’s race and think, I’m doing a bad job because you’re going faster. You just focus on your own pace. I know this sounds very goal-oriented, but it’s actually been helpful to me in every area of my life. On the creative level, I’m revising some writing right now, and my only goal is to hit a certain word count every day. That’s it. If I’m feeling good, I go over it, but my job is not to go under it. I don’t worry too much about whether the writing is going anywhere (existentially, lol), what anyone else is writing, or if I’m writing fast enough—I just keep going. […] If you’re forever looking around for validation, you’ll never be able to make anything that’s completely your own. Because you don’t even know what you think. You don’t know what is good and beautiful outside of what is culturally dictated to be good and beautiful. We believe that desire is mimetic, but we forget that the people who inspire real desire are always people who are redefining it—who give us something new to look at, allow us to escape groupthink. There’s nothing more powerful than separating signal from noise, spotting a phenomenon no one else has recognized yet. But to do that you need your own separate thoughts. So: cultivate your independence. Run your own race, knowing that the destination is yours to choose. Don’t enslave yourself to people who think there’s only one way to be right. Your job is to do what you like on your own terms. Your job is to keep going, to eke out good day after good day.”— Ava, run your own race
I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don’t mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep” and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
- Hugh Mackay
