Reset, readjust, restart, refocus.As many times as you need to.
Just don't quit!
I never feared about my skills because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear.
So if you put forth the work, what are you fearing? You know what you're capable of doing and what you're not.
-- Michael Jordan
MermaidDiagram Comment.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?
Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Science is the poetry of reality.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.
I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.
Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.
It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.
If I’d been born in ancient Greece, I’d worship Zeus and Aphrodite
But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.
These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t be all right
There are so many different faiths. How do you know the holy book you have been brought up with is the true one? And if all the others are wrong, what makes you think your holy book isn't wrong too?
Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators.
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.
A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.
To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation.
O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem.
Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference).
If more doctors understood Darwinism, humanity would not now be facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance.
An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of a tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
To describe the forests of the world as its 'lungs' does no harm, and it might do some good if it encourages people to preserve them. But the rhetoric of holistic harmony can degenerate into a kind of dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism.
Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.
We don't usually see this happening but, like detectives arriving on the scene after a crime, we can piece together what must have happened from the evidence that remains.
The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not 'meant' to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, 'But we're working on it.
Knowledge Strategy Execution
Motivation is a byproduct of action, not the catalyst for it.
Control your thoughts or your thoughts will control you.
Today is a new day. Stop living in the past.
Focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase.
You attract what you are, not what you want. If you want great, then be great.
Your goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot.
