To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certa...
In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this 'mere object', overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[...] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power, and as such, it is often disori...
Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” “Is wanting to be different a serious illness?” “It is if you force yourself to be the same a...
They were different colors: the right one blue, the left green. And her face in the light of the candle on the table startled me at first, just as it had in the icy night air. After seeing it on the street, I was afraid I had only imagined it: a stil...
. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul. Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices...
Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories ma...
I was only able to get over my past when I decided I was going to! As I’ve discovered, that’s how everything starts. I decided to get out of bed this morning. I decided to get ready for work (D’oh! Another early morning). Everything I did today...
Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and cho...
Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on g...
I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn't necessarily have admitted it - except...
Another great example of the power of vulnerability -- this time in a corporation -- is the leadership approach taken by Lululemon's CEO, Christine Day. In a video interview with CNN Money, Day explained that she was once a very bright, smart executi...
Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease de...
I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were...
Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applyin...
God cautions us in Isaiah 55:9 that his ways are not ours and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts (undoubtedly one of the grander understatements). God is warning us that he is not logical and that believing him to be logical will lead to all k...
The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having pe...
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scor...
Julia Kline, you’ve spent your whole life running and all you’ve done is run farther away from the love that’s been waiting for you all along. The first time you smiled at me with your two missing teeth you had my undivided attention. When you ...
There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that's because you're dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion. Uh, when you're dealing with something with ce...
There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine’s critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another p...
In your rare embrace, sometimes I am lost nowadays. In these years, you have changed. I have changed. Every single day, we’re fighting our feuds silently; inventing devious ways to hurt one another. Our gazes keep to our feet: wavering, pirouetting...
