You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

Your arrogance in your manhood prevents you from understanding.

Things appear very complex but underneath they are quite simple. People complicate things by super-imposing their own viewpoints and advantages. If you remove all that is superfluous, most problems have very simple solutions.

If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

Your problem, you pea-brained, overbearing, pompous crayfish, is that you think you have any idea of what you’re dealing with.

I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant.

I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.

When you can hold the world in your palm and see it from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant – you do not realize that when looking from such a great distance, everything becomes blurred, and that you end up imagining rather than really seeing things.

It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.

Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things.

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.

The travesty exists only because reliance upon abstraction has made reality incomprehensible to you.