The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion — but what matters is not whether time is real, but whether we have used it as though something depended on us.

It is not the neutrality of stone that we should seek, but the engagement of fire — which warms and illuminates and also, if we are careless, burns. Safety, for one who truly thinks, is the beginning of death.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. If you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

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Route 66 Is Turning 100 This Year. It Still Has Stories to Tell About America.

As we drove, we started to realize that all these roadside attractions felt fresh to us because they came from a completely different idea of what entertainment could be. There were no screens, no apps, no log-ins—just giant objects, neon signs, and roadside oddities designed to catch your eye and pull you in. It made us realize how hungry we were for experiences that are tangible, specific, and rooted in the real world, things you can't swipe past or experience through a screen.

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To a man who is indifferent to beauty, the Sistine ceiling is only paint on plaster.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and immediately go in search of them.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and appalled by alien forms; which love them when found, but will have none of them when not directly forced upon us.

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar overcrowded with cheap wares, all one's attention is perpetually distracted by some new and startling suggestion.

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar overcrowded with all sorts of goods, each clamoring for attention.

The moment one learns English, complications set in. As soon as we have learned to read, we begin, almost inevitably, to read the kind of thing we had already decided to enjoy. The reading of newspapers and popular novels—anything, in short, which has an immediate appeal—goes on at such a pace, and fills the hours so completely, that we have no leisure to feel bored.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely at those moments when we forget ourselves—when we are absorbed in something other than our own ego.

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar overcrowded with cheap wares, all of them perhaps useful or insignificant, jostling against each other and preventing the customer from getting what he really needs.

The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and we see only with our eyes open to the world; blindness is not the absence of sight but the refusal to look.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we become most fully conscious precisely when we lose the sense of being conscious at all, when the instrument becomes so perfectly attuned to its object that subject and object merge into one continuous act of perception.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are indifferent to others, remaining by nature blind to facts that are uncongenial to them.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and especially apt to be lively and to produce the感 of reality whenever they are stimulated.

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Our Longing for Inconvenience

There's so much to learn and to savor in friction, he suggests, be it waiting for a song on the radio to complete a prized mixtape or the deep connection we can find if we go through the time and trouble to ditch electronic communication and actually meet others, face to face.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are negative to others, making us accept or reject much that we might theoretically be indifferent to.

Every external fact to which you are indifferent is irrelevant to you, save in so far as it may be a sign of fact to which you are not indifferent. Only the facts to which you react emotionally have any intrinsic interest for you either of the practical or the theoretic sort.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are interested in them, and consequently neglects the rest. The result is that whilst the world of each of us, as we know it, is a sort of mental monster—selectively interested, systematically partial.

The purpose of consciousness is to orchestrate behavior, and consciousness succeeds brilliantly at this task when it stays in the background, when it doesn't interfere with the smooth operation of the automatic processes that have been honed by natural selection.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are apathetic to others, until education and experience have taught it to attend to every thing that may be of consequence.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and come soonest into play. Fear comes first, then probably sympathy or motor discharge of some sort; then curiosity about the novel situation; and finally systematic procedure and definition of it.

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Is There Life After Smartphones?

The moment he felt sad, or scared, or uneasy, or bored, his hand would shoot instinctively, Gollum-like, toward the device. He scrolled while he walked, while he lay in bed; he scrolled while talking with friends.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore others, leaving us to perceive only a biased sectional view of the world.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and which ignore the rest, and this selectiveness is as characteristic of man as of the lower animals. A thing is important if it has consequences, if it is connected with our emotional and practical interests; otherwise it is trivial and unworthy of notice.