As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

All good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.

Better not to plant seeds of selfishness than try to eradicate them once they have grown into giant weeds. (91)

You've got to win in sports - that's talent - but you've also got to learn how to remind everybody how you did win, and how often. That comes with experience.

If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

The quiet was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along while all the trees leaned over them and listened.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

Be the ugly one, look at the nice one.

There’s fish in here that I’ve read about that are so see-through that they’re invisible. So I don’t even think they know they exist.

The inner is the foundation of the outer. The still is master of the restless. The Sage travels all day yet never leaves his inner treasure.

Baseball is my life, the only thing I know and can talk about. My only interest.