Sixteen is a hard time. A lot of kids are experimenting with things.
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlastin...
I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process ...
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our i...
Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn’t come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is ca...
My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there whe...
One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained...
Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon; it is what consciousness is _about_ that is complex. It is presumably this fact that is the reason many scientists over the decades have ...
I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, ...
Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamen...
Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an ...
As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me: You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normal...
Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: li...
Triton: I consider myself a reasonable merman. I set certain rules, and I expect those rules to be obeyed. Ariel: But Daddy! Triton: Is it true you rescued a human from drowning? Ariel: Daddy, I had to. Triton: Contact between the human world and the...
In my experience, influence is power.
Art isn't a product. It's an experience
Age affects how people experience time.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
You have to surrender yourself to the experience.
