Quotes from Robert Wright

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

Natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion—the illusion you implicitly subscribe to when you follow the feeling, the illusion that the rage, and for that matter the revenge it inspires, is fundamentally "good." It turns out the feeling isn't even good in the basic sense of self-interest.

Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

From natural selection's point of view, status assistance is the main purpose of friendship.

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as "divine" in some sense of the word?

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

I]f it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.