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Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

— Robert Sapolsky Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

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Faith

More quotes by Robert Sapolsky

Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)

The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.

The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)

From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are.

The Neuroscience Behind Behavior (2017)

We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Colin Wilson Postscript to the Outsider (1967)

Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."

Jonathan Edwards Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Sapolsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.