Epstein Inspirational Quotes

We learn who we are only by living, and not before.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.

We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am older,' said the boy to his father, 'I will carry you across this river as you now do for me.' 'No, you won't,' said the father stoically. 'When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you.' Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism--to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not.

We learn who we are only by living and not before.

The single thought that can empower us to empower the world: Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous-because the human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

she was known as an intellectual force for women’s suffrage. She was a strong believer that women’s rights and the abolition of slavery should be approached as one issue, a controversial proposition at the time. “Emancipation from every kind of human bondage is my principle,” she said.

In the Jewish world, when someone dies, it is customary to say Baruch dayan ha’emet, which means “Blessed be the true judge.

William Holden had his own approach. "Take any picture you can. One out of four will be good, one out of ten will be very good and one out of fifteen will get you an Oscar.

Personally, I can do very little, but I can contribute to a whole chain of events, and that's a marvelous feeling. It's like a bonus to me towards the end of my life. It gives me a voice." (Audrey Hepburn)

The whole concept of what a good life ought to look like also changed with the secular revolution. A good life used to mean a life of suffering. Why? Because nearly everyone was suffering so much from lack of decent food, shelter, medicine, and leisure time that the best way to prevent panic was to assert that "your suffering is good for you." So Jesus became a suffering role model. Buddhism cultivated meditative techniques as an escape from worldly suffering. And African American slaves sang of the redemption their protracted pain would bring them in the next life. But the Enlightenment propagated a new (to most people), Humanistic view of a good life. This new view was made possible by new science and technology that made commerce, communication, and existence in general easier. It was motivated by horror at the centuries of religiously inspired mass murder that had terrorized Europe. It was influenced by Epicurus and Lucretius as well as the Roman Cicero and other early human-centered thinkers. And it was expressed in manifold ways by brilliant writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and others whose work is now considered among the foundation stones of contemporary Humanist philosophy. But our view was first "canonized" in the Declaration of Independence,most likely by Thomas Jefferson: that all people are equally deserving of an opportunity to pursue happiness and to be free of suffering in this life (rather than be redeemed by it in the next life). My late mentor Sherwin Wine used to say that he knew that his mother had a pre-secular revolution mind-set because she didn't understand how to be "happy." Suffering, she could take. But happiness? Oy! What is there to be so happy about - the world is a mess!