“True character arises from a deeper well than religion.”

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.

Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

I’m not a pop act, churning stuff out really quickly. I find the music that arises from that style of working is distracted, not particularly profound.

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.

Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.

First thing every morning before you arise say out loud, ‘I believe,’ three times.

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.