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1 " The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. "
― Cordelia Fine , Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
2 " I have come to realize that a person’s relationship with their career is no different than their relationship with their spouse. You wake up together. You go to sleep together. You live together. It is possible to stay in a relationship that is based on convenience, financial security, or necessity, as opposed to genuine passion or love. But chances are that if the relationship is not built on genuine passion and love, it will have some difficulty at some point in time. Chances are it will fall apart at some point in time. And even if you manage to make it work, it just doesn’t feel good every day to wake up and go to sleep with someone or something you are simply not passionate about.The other thing I have come to realize is perhaps even more important. They say that people are afraid to fail. The proverbial “they”. I don’t know who “they” are, but they say it… People are afraid to fail. Or so it goes. But I disagree. People may think they are afraid to fail. But they are not afraid of failure per se. They are actually only afraid that other people will see that they have failed. They are afraid of what other will think of their failure. People will take incredible chances when there is no risk of others witnessing their failure. It’s why people dance and sing in the shower. It is the fear of what others will think of their failure that leads to constraints. Despair. Even suicide. In my career, I have seen multiple friends and clients give up, I am certain, out of a perceived shame of what they must have thought others were thinking of their failures... But it is an objective, outright, and utterly useless hindrance. A hindrance to success. There is nothing constructive about it. It is a reflex to overcome.... Flukes aside, success requires total dedication. "
3 " The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? "
― James Salter , Light Years