Than - Quotes
I`ve lived long enough to know that any promise made beside the word "forever" is no more than a lie agreed upon. There is no forever. Everything moves towards its end. And the closer we get to ours, the louder that clock ticks, the less a sane man would let a promise deprive him of happiness.
If you`re going to cry over a man better on a private jet than on a bus.
There`s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.
Even if life has some challenges, it is generally better than the alternative!
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it`s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It`s a prerogative that`s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures - the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning.
It`s better to be bold than meek. [...] If you jump off a cliff at least you`ll fly before you fall.
Our world is more like chess than tic-tac-toe. We can never plan too far ahead; the number of possibilities available to us in our everyday life is too great to contemplate.
From the moment we are born we are presented with absolute facts rather than situated ones. We aren`t taught that distinctions such as young and old or healthy and unhealthy are social constructions and that their meaning depends on context. We are conditioned to learn about and see the world as a set of facts, such as 1 + 1 = 2. The world is far more subtle than such facts allow, and we should have learned that 1 + 1=2 only if we are using the base 10 number system, but that it equals 10 if the number system is base 2, and that 1 + 1 = 1 if we are adding one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum.
It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.