At times like this he always recalled, uneasily, that everyone on earth at a particular latitude sees the same stars in the sky. But no two cultures see the same constellations. He’d seen evidence of the phenomenon again and again: The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.

Normally the thought that someone had paid seventy-five thousand dollars to ride around in a giant toaster would have made him smile.

The personal collisions that upset us the most, the ones we seem powerless to let go of, are those in which we played a role that we are unwilling to acknowledge. That’s why the pain lasts – because we refuse to look at its source. We cannot detach it, because we refuse to look at the point of attachment.

Nothing leaves you more vulnerable to your past than the illusion that you’ve dealt with it.

Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.

That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.

The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we’re wrong we fight the hardest to prove we’re right.” Caught.

He was actually quite fond of discrepancies because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.

No hay peor dolor que tener a dos personas viviendo en un cuerpo.

Whenever they collide, facts are no match for beliefs. We may think our beliefs are based on facts, but the truth is that the facts we embrace are based on our beliefs. The great conceit of the rational mind is that facts are ultimately persuasive. But that’s a fantasy. People don’t die to defend the facts, they die to defend their beliefs.