Every moment of the day — indeed, every moment throughout one’s life — offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily. - Sam Harris

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true.

You have not built your mind. And in moments in which you seem to build it — when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill — the only tools at your disposal are those that you have inherited from moments past.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior — but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter — and there are paths toward making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do — for instance, after going back and forth between two options — I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable.

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.