We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes–one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

Stephen Jay Gould
About This Quote

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. The time we spend on this planet is finite; we can never go back in time and change the past. We can only create the future we want to live in for ourselves and others that will come after us.

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  2. What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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More Quotes By Stephen Jay Gould
  1. We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
  2. We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
  3. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
  4. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
  5. Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way...
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