From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's a tension amongst the countries who belong to, and who have led, international organisations. Are they there to solve problems which no country can alone solve? Or – are they there to impose one particular view of the world on the rest of the world?
Nothing in this world has deep enough roots to sustain us. We keep grasping for something in the world that we think will ease our existential pain, but the pain itself is a result of over-identifying with the world.
Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and our explanations of how the world works have therefore to be considered as provisional. This means we have to accept that sometimes we will turn out afterwards to have been wrong.
What it means to be creative is pretty simple. It's to do something human, something generous, something that might not work. It has to be all 3 of those things. You will find creative accountants, politicians, housekeepers and engineers… being creative is to solve interesting problems!
Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.
Most of the pain you feel, you create. Most of the pain stems from the conversations we are having with ourselves. It is not the actual event outside of us that affects us. That's the case 99% of the time.
an object must be useful before being beautiful.
We all inhabit distinctive inner universes. We all see and experience the world in a slightly different way. Understanding perception has a lot of consequences for understanding who we are.
I often have odd conversations where people say, 'Should we take happiness seriously?' And I pause and ask, 'How do you feel about misery and suffering—are those not bad? Do they not matter at all?' Then they admit, 'Oh yeah'. I then ask 'so, don't you think it's good if people enjoy their lives?' And they say, 'I suppose so.' So, everyone agrees happiness matters to some extent – but we often forget this and need to bring it to the surface.
Nobody knows how far we can go as humans and so I listened only to myself and my body and pushed it to go beyond perceived limitations, and guess what – outside that boundary is a whole new life where you really start to live.
In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.
I look at life as a game rather than as success and failure. For most people, failure is a dirty word... they avoid anything to do with failure, they won't go anywhere near it. It stops them trying – stops them committing – stops them experimenting.