iQuote

... the fact is that there is one extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly.

For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumble and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn't terribly ambitious.

~ Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

When I was young, 50 seemed like a very big number. I once believed I'd never live a long life and that my future would be different. But now I am right in the middle of my own future, and I have not found any real change in myself. My dream is as far as it was during my childhood. The only difference is that I have already lost my plan to realize it.

~ Wang Shuo

- What do you think faith is?
- Faith is the belief in something that can't be proven to exist.
- And why don't you have it?
- I think God is something People use to avoid reality. I think faith allows People to reject what is in front of our eyes, which is that this thing, this life, this existence, this consciousness, or whatever word you want to use for it, is all we have, and all we'll ever have. I think People have faith because they want to need to believe in something, whatever that something is, because life can be hard and depressing and brutal if you don't.
- You may be right, but what about accepting the idea that faith can make your life better. I know my faith makes my life better, and whether what I believe in exists or not, because I have faith in it, I get the benefits of that faith ... You can't prove love or friendship exist, but you still have faith in them. I'm asking you to apply the same principle to someething greater than yourself.
- I can feel love and friendship. I can see and touch and talk to the People I love and the People I choose to make my friends. The idea of God doesn't make me feel anything and I can't see God or touch God or talk to God.
- Have you ever tried to open yourself up to the idea of faith? ... I want you to stop intellectualizing it and try to open yourself to it.
- I've never believed in God, not even as a little Kid. I'm not going to start now.

~ James Frey, " A Million Little Pieces"

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success; every goal I set myself, every recognition I craved made anything I actually did seem paltry by comparison, and whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.

~ Bernhard Schlink, "The Reader"

One is often told it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told, I have not noticed it ...

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward dimunition of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world ...

My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar; and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they become able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any other.

~ Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"
taken from Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven"