You are not in control of your mind — because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.15 You can do… - Sam Harris

" "

You are not in control of your mind — because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.15 You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. Of course, you can create a framework in which certain decisions are more likely than others — you can, for instance, purge your house of all sweets, making it very unlikely that you will eat dessert later in the evening — but you cannot know why you were able to submit to such a framework today when you weren’t yesterday.
So it’s not that willpower isn’t important or that it is destined to be undermined by biology. Willpower is itself a biological phenomenon. You can change your life, and yourself, through effort and discipline — but you have whatever capacity for effort and discipline you have in this moment, and not a scintilla more (or less). You are either lucky in this department or you aren’t — and you cannot make your own luck.

English
Collect this quote

About Sam Harris

Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), and most recently Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Samuel Benjamin Harris
Alternative Names: Samuel Harris
Unlimited Quote Collections

Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Shorter versions of this quote

Unlimited Quote Collections

Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.

Additional quotes by Sam Harris

How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out.

Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books."

Loading...