#truism

People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#generosity #loyalty #trustworthiness #nature

We, all of us, could do a much better job of evoking what someone has called the universal principle of human altruism: the urge in us all to help others who are in danger. ↗

— Bart Starr

#better #better job #called #could #danger

I dislike guilt." the Morrigan said." it is regret and recrimination and despair over that which cannot be changed. It is like eating ashes for breakfast. It is the whip that clerics use on the laity, making the sheep slaves to whatever moral code the shepherds espouse. it is a catalyst for suicide and untold other acts of selfishness and stupidity. I cannot think of a more poisonous emotion!" ... "Why do you bother to feel it?" Atticus: "Because an inability to feel guilt points to sociopathic tendencies. ↗

— Kevin Hearne

#change

Your not reliable. You wouldn't be at all a comfortable sort of person to live with. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#death

Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#experience

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you. ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#independence #people #time #truism #life

Follow the rules until you make them. ↗

— Luke Green

#skills #truisms #writing #life

Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation. ↗

— Robert Wright

#evolution #natural-selection #reciprocity #nature

There is the natural liar...Always says the thing that sounds best. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#nature

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ↗

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

#creative #darkness #decide #destructive #every