To say that someone freely chose to squander his life's savings at the poker table is to say that he had every opportunity to do otherwise and that n… - Sam Harris

My choices matter — and there are paths towards making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do — for instance, after going back between two options — I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.

Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful — and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end.