Just like we need food and water, humans need each other.

 A brain study revealed that when placed in an MRI, a patient's reward center lit up when another person sat in the room. 

Neurons fire when talk to someone, think about someone, and they go haywire when we hold someone's hand.

 Our brains and bodies are actually programmed to seek each other out and connect. 

So then why do so many people prefer being alone?

 Why do we often run for the hills when we feel the slightest connection?

 Why we do we feel compelled to fight what we're hardwired to do?

 Maybe it's because when we find someone or something to hold on to, that feeling becomes like air. 

And we're terrified we're going to lose it. 

, you can get pretty good at the alone thing.

 But most things are better when they're shared with someone else

 

Too often, the thing you want most is the one thing you can't have. 

Desire leaves us heartbroken. 

It wears us out.

 Desire can wreck your life.

 But as tough as wanting something can be, 

the people who suffer the most are those who don't know what they want.

 

So, do it. Decide.

Is this the life you want to live?

Is this the person you want to love?

Is this the best you can be?

Can you be stronger? Kinder? More compassionate? 

Decide.

Breathe in. 

Breathe out & decide.

 

Wisdom is being able to see the world for what it is, 

rather than what you want it to be

 

if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. 

From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn.

 

Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment.

 And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.

 

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. 

Each minute  thousands of animals are being eaten alive,

 many others are running for their lives, 

whimpering with fear, 

others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites,

 thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. 

It must be so. 

If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

 In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, 

blind physical forces and genetic replication, 

some people are going to get hurt, 

other people are going to get lucky,

 and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. 

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, 

at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good,

 nothing but pitiless indifference

 

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded,

 “This is better than we thought!

 The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” 

Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

 A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

 

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, 

he's one who asks the right questions.

 

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. 

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? 

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. 

Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

 

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: 

when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability.

 Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. 

With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth.

 Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. 

The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control

 

 how do we know that two and two make four?

 Or that the force of gravity works? 

Or that the past is unchangeable?

 If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable

 – what then?

 

it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring

 

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field

 

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

 

Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. 

Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you.

 Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.

 

You cannot control the behavior of others, 

but you can always choose how you respond to it

 

Imperfection is beauty, 

madness is genius 

it's better to be absolutely ridiculous

 than absolutely boring.