-- A.A. Milne
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People with a higher IQ are more likely to be vegetarian, psychological research finds.
In fact, vegetarians could be up to 10% more intelligent than red meat eaters, according to some studies.
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‘The Lure of Death: Suicide and Human Evolution’,
At some point in evolutionary history, human beings came to understand, as no non-human animals do, that death brings to an end a person's bodily and mental presence in the world. A potentially devastating consequence was that individuals, seeking to escape physical or mental pain, might choose to kill themselves.
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“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”
“There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”
“Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.”
“One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: ‘This too shall pass.'”
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”
“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”
“Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.”
“If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”
“A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”
“The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
“Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”
“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”
“Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.”
“To appreciate life’s small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”
“As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”
“Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.”
“Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.”
“Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”
“Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.”
“If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.”
“Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don’t yet know what to do with.”
“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
“How we feel about ‘the nature of existence’ is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.”
“Insomnia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.”
“The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.”
“Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
“We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired.”
“It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”
“It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one’s body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one’s legs.”
“Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.”
“What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly ‘whole’.”
“The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.”
“Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.”
“Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.”
“If you want to turn a stranger into a friend, try telling them some of the ways in which you’ve failed.”
“Anxiety is insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for.”
“The constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.”
“It takes a serious lack of imagination to have an entirely clean conscience.”
“We mostly lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; but with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.”
“You have to feel quite out of control in order to get controlling.”
“Hypochondria: an above-average imagination applied to the deeply improbable nature of being alive.”
“The difference between bitterness, confusion, nostalgia – and resilience is… a plan.”
“Change begins when the fear of not acting at all at last outstrips the paralysing fear of making a mistake.”
“For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.”
“The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”
“Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.”
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
“Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.”
Emmanuel Levinas described a dog who used to wander into the Nazi labour camp where he was imprisoned. ‘The dog was always glad to see the prisoners, and thus was the sole creature to treat them as humans. He knew perfectly well that his imprisoned friends were sentient beings and he treated them as such, while their own conspecifics, the Nazi prison guards, did not.’
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argued, on theoretical grounds, that phenomenal consciousness is restricted to warm-blooded animals. It wasn't a physiological possibility until the brain warmed up, nor was it ecologically relevant until animals became relatively free of environmental constraints. If that's right, the simplest evolutionary scenario would be that sentience arose early on in the stems of both mammals and birds and thereafter has remained a universal feature across their descendants. This would imply that, if we can be sure that any mammal or any bird is sentient, we can be pretty sure all are: that's to say all 6,000 mammal species and all 10,000 bird species. But there's a plausible alternative scenario. This would be that sentience has actually arisen several times among mammals and birds, not in the stems of the evolutionary tree but later on, in the branches to which they gave rise.
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