| H2 tags : “The only thing constant in life is change.”; “One is never intrinsically strong, just by nature. You must have been through something. Strength has to be acquired. You don’t know how to acquired it. Suddenly you’re standing there, and things that are deadly to others are no longer a danger to you.”; “You can lead a man to the university, but you can’t make him think.”; “For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your
attitude toward something that is moving.”; “No matter where you go, there you are.”; “Lead by our perceptions, ideals, fears and complexes we sometimes take away the right of others to be happy. We take away their freedom!”; “A human being is the best computer available to place in a spacecraft… It is also the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.”; “Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live forever in the cradle.”; “Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”; “Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision…
We can recognize here a shortcoming—in some circumstances serious—in our ability to
understand the world. Characteristically, we seem compelled to project our own
nature onto Nature…
“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy [of] the interposition of a deity,”
Darwin wrote telegraphically in his notebook. “More humble and I think truer to consider him
created from animals.”…
We’re Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves…
The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall…
If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?…
We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self deception, none is evident.
The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable…
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop…
Our commonsense intuitions can be mistaken. Our preferences don’t count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame…
If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal…” |
