Nick Lee

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

 

The quote is from Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” This passage draws a sharp distinction between humans and other animals by touching upon the concept of belief in the afterlife and the ability to trade immediate tangible benefits for intangible future rewards.

[Read more…] about Reading Between the Lines – ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’

To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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