Quotes
2,628 quote
“Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
"If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness"
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Poverty, sickness, wars, famines old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment.
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
"Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
“Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science
"Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
Yuval Noah Harari
•
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
History, Science