there is in fact no logical path from ‘The world is not organised as I, if I were God, would have organised it’ to ‘God does not exist’. Any attempt to create such a path implies that a human being can imagine what it would be like to be God – and as Thomas Nagel pointed out, we can’t even imagine what it’s like to be a bat, never mind God.

— Martin Jenkins, Evil From the Outside

In big companies, the most telling evidence that meetings are essentially bankrupt is the prevalence of “pre-meetings.”

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

What do I care about all this beauty, when every minute, every second, I must and am forced to know that even this tiny fly that is now buzzing near me in a ray of sunlight, even it participates in this banquet and chorus, knows its place, loves it, and is happy, while I alone am a castaway, and only in my pusillanimity did not want to understand it till now!

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

But, friend, when you know certain things: these things lead to dispassion not to passion; to detachment not to bondage; to diminution not to accumulation; to having few wishes, not to having many wishes; to contentment not to discontent; to seclusion not to gregariousness; to the arousing of energy, not to indolence; to frugality not to luxurious living – of such things you can be certain.

— Thera Nyanaponika and Bhikkitu Bodhi, Numerical Discourses of the Buddha