The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.” (Sapiens Quotes)
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. ”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueler with the passing of the centuries.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Even more money is transferred to the bank accounts of fashion designers, gym managers, dieticians, cosmeticians and plastic surgeons, who help us arrive at the café looking as similar as possible to the market’s ideal of beauty.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Poverty, sickness, wars, famines old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. This is an unjust stereotype.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens
