June 2011
31 posts
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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
– Plato, classical Greek philosopher, author, and mathematician
(via rarified)
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WatchJill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story, delivered at the TED2008 conference.
Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about “right here, right now.” Our right hemisphere, it...
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“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”
– Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
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“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known...”
– Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
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“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
– Alan Watts, British philosopher and author
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“Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.”
– Ralph Gerard, American neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist
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“To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light.”
– Carl G. Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)
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“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the...”
– Blaise Pascal, Pensees
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“It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to...”
– —Jhumpa Lahiri
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has said that she feels more comfortable observing other people than being a participant on the stage of life. But in this week’s New Yorker, Lahiri opens up and tells the story of how she became a writer. Hers is a story of stealth audacity and of...
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“Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from...”
– Marcus Antonius, Roman politician and general (80-30 BC)
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“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
– Philip K. Dick
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“We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones.”
– Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
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“Health is not a commodity. Risk factors are not disease. Aging is not an...”
– David Loxtercamp, author of A Measure of Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor, as read in his interview with NPR’s Liane Hansen.
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“As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.”
– Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
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“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every...”
– William C. Dement, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences
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“Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most...”
– Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness 