Sam Harris Quotes - Page 2

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,
because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-
jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.

If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present

You can do what you decide to do - but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.