Sam Harris Quotes
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Meditation … puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness-a more refined version of the problem you already have.
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No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs.
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I do not choose to choose what I choose.
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You are either lucky in this department or you aren't-and you cannot make your own luck.
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It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
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Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the 'self'-the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head-is an illusion.
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Your mind is all you truly have.
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There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison.
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But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions.
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I think it getting a gun should be like getting a pilot's license. I think you should require training to get a license to have a gun.
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You are happily being misunderstood in your use of the word 'God'.
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The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.
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Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It’s just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we’re left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.
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To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
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Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
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The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.