It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us..

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or….

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it..

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stabl….

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and al….

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us..

I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra..

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself..

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit ….

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confus….

What you can imagine depends on what you know..

The mind is the effect, not the cause..

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it….

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares..

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism..

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transpar….

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously….

I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think there are better ways ….

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ev….

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers..

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It ….