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What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
 
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
 
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
 
The problem is not that religious people are stupid. It's not that religious fundamentalists are stupid. I happen to think that you can be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb, and still get--and still believe that you will get the 72 virgins in paradise--that is the problem. The problem is that--religion--because it has been sheltered from criticism as it has been--allows people--perfectly sane, perfectly intelligent people--to believe en masse, what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
 
If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.
 
Education Is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.
 
Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
 
Emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between.
 
Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far-reaching effects.
 
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
 
If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
 
One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.
 
To understand the whole operation of one’s own mind requires a great deal of insight, a great deal of inquiry without condemnation.
 
When you release your expectations that the world should fulfill you, your disappointments vanish.
 
Life is a game, and we are all playing it according to certain rules.
 
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
 
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
 
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
 
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
 
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
 
2718 quotes