Recommended Reading
- Effective Communication Skills, The Great Courses – Prof. Dalton Kehoe, PhD
- Cultural Literacy for Religion: Everything the Well-Educated Person Should Know, The Great Courses – Professor Mark Berkson, Ph.D
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life – Daniel C. Dennett
- Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision Of Life As Play and Possibility – James P. Carse (pdf)
- Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts – Annie Duke
- The Last Question – Isaac Asimov
- Stubborn Attachments:A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals – Tyler Cowen
- Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High (pdf)
- Ozymandias – Percy Shelley
- Invictus – William Ernest Henley
- If – Rudyard Kipling
Quotes
Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?
Blaise Pascal
By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn.
Blaise Pascal
Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.
Blaise Pascal
What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?
Blaise Pascal
What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?
Blaise Pascal
Resources
The ultimate critical thinking worksheet.