Habits That Are Killing You Slowly But Surely

Source: Science in the News — Havard University

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”

― James Clear, Atomic Habits

Source: Charlie Mana
Rhys Tranter

“A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Mark 8:36

Portrait by Vasili Perov, 1872

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea…and even then every man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element…simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Reduction Of Sex To Lust

Daily Mail: Paintings from Pompeii
Amazon

“The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring those ‘men of action’ who practise violence. Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS. Thus the four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were the spearhead of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ in Eastern Europe contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among the officers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded ‘D’ Battalion, for instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence. Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admirers in his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung.”

Lethbridge Gallery
The Verge

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly.”

Sigmund Freud’s 1909 Visit to Clark University

When Carl Jung was asked, “Do you believe in God?”, he replied with his most famous televised quote, “I don’t need to believe, I know.”

Hiding From Our True Selves

Sisyphus, the symbol of the absurdity of existence, painting by Franz Stuck (1920)
Amazon

“As Stephen researched about 200 years of success literature, it was discovered that so much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes — with social band-aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.”

Amazon

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The Untruth of Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

“the unexamined life is not worth living”,

Goodreads

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

Avoiding the Truth

Disillusionment by Edouard Hamman (1851)
Amazon

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.”

Amazon

“What is Truth?”

Academy of Ideas
Gregory Peck as Finch in the 1962 film adaptation

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions… but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

The Suicide of Smerdyakov by Alice Neel

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Student of Computer Science & the Humanities. http://rahulsam.me/

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