Quotes from Sam Harris

This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.

uncritical loyalty

What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord's name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one's father or mother? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery?

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.

The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control.

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.

God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely just. Why not, then, delight in the death throes of a sinful world?

This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

the bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself—not Islamism—is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities.

subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

mindfulness" is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are.

there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts "objectively.

In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.

neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander, engaging in what has been called "stimulus-independent thought.

In neither case does the open-endedness of our inquiry suggest that there are no real facts to be known, or that some of the answers we have in hand are not really better than some others. Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts are in.

Although not a single leader of the Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.

the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion.

Mentir es alzar una frontera entre la verdad en la que vivimos y la percepción que los demás tienen de nosotros.

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one's beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one's beliefs about the world are true.

Cessation is believed to be a direct insight into an unconditioned reality (Pali: Nibb?na; Sanskrit: Nirvana) that lies behind all manifest phenomena.