Chapter 12

p1 - the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

Chapter 13

p1 - banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.

p1 - trenches of adult existence

Chapter 16

p1 - “teaching you how to think.”

Chapter 18

p1 - the choice of what to think about

Chapter 28

p1 - two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.

Chapter 30

p1 - where these individual templates and beliefs come from

Chapter 36

p1 - arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

Chapter 37

p1 - be just a little less arrogant

Chapter 48

p1 - getting free of my natural, hardwired default setting,

Chapter 52

p1 - the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.

Chapter 57

p1 - “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

Chapter 58

p1 - It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Chapter 59

p1 - Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Chapter 60

p1 - the mind being “an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

Chapter 64

p1 - your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely,completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

Chapter 67

p1 - you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out”really means.

Chapter 69

p1 - routine

Chapter 71

p1 - because you have to get up the next day and do it all again.

Chapter 80

p1 - The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in.

Chapter 81

p1 - Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way

Chapter 84

p1 - Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice.

Chapter 93

p1 - Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible

Chapter 96

p1 - It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred

Chapter 97

p1 - The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.

Chapter 101

p1 - In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.

Chapter 105

p1 - pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Chapter 106

p1 - If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough.

Chapter 113

p1 - Worship your intellect, being seen as smart —you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Chapter 115

p1 - they are unconscious.

Chapter 123

p1 - The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them

Chapter 133

p1 - It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

Chapter 134

p1 - everything to do with simple awareness