A downloadable PDF. Chapter nine from Carl Sagan's book The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. The book is comprised of lectures originally presented at the centennial celebration of the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985.
I've Always Been a Record Man
"I'd rather play music all day and sleep in my own bed than drive all day, play music for an hour, and sleep in a weird place."
--Brad Cook
"It's very self-centered, my art. It's very selfish and personal. But this is what we do. What you learn is that everybody is self-involved. I think all life is. I've always just presented myself. Sometimes that's embarrassing, sometimes it's too much."
--James Taylor
"Funny? I can see it's easy to laugh at the dreamers nowadays. I can see that the new generation thinks the flower-power lot were a bunch of potheads with nothing else to do except play guitars, read their poems, and screw one another as the whim took them. I can see that the organizers of Woodstock turn up for interviews wearing ties and talk with amusement about the ideas of those times, which obviously seem very naive to them now. But I can also see that the world would have been a very different place wthout the ideals that generation stood for. Slogans like peace and love may be cliches now, but back then we meant it. With all our hearts."
--The Bat by Jo Nesbo
"Don't confuse the spirit world with mental health issues."
--True Detective Season 4
"Just as the salivary glands secrete saliva, the mind secretes thoughts. The thoughts think themselves. This thought production is not bad, it’s simply what minds do. A cartoon I once saw depicts a car on a long western desert highway. A roadside sign warns, 'Your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles.'”
--Jack Kornfield