Sean M. Carroll Quotes

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Change isn't easy…. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think. Changing the way you think means changing what you believe about life. That's hard, …. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.

We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.

. . . escape is easier than change.

One of the hardest expressions of self-assertiveness is challenging your limiting beliefs.

Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something...Many of us are fundamentalists...because it worked pretty well for us.

It is easy to stay the same but it is not easy to change. Most people choose to stay the same all their lives.

People try to hold onto the sameness. This holding onto prevents growth.

Once you arrive at an interpretation which you are comfortable in giving, no matter how specious it might be, and you are comfortable doing it, you stay there, you just stay there, and the facts are not going to change you.

A person who refuses to risk change fails to grow.

What if I told you that 10 years from now, your life would be exactly the same? I doubt you would be happy. So, why are you so afraid of change?

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.

Change is painful. Few people have the courage to seek out change. Most people won’t change until the pain of where they are exceeds the pain of change.

As you get older, you get stuck in your ways; just as you become stiffer physically, you also become stiffer mentally and more narrow-minded unless you make a conscious effort to keep yourself flexible.

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it’s safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don’t grow anymore.

For many people, change is more threatening than challenging. They see it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting.

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

It's hard to make changes. Things get so comfortable and you don't want to move. Maybe it would do you good to be a little uncomfortable for a while, and do something different.

If we go for the easy way, then we never change.

The more time you spend in your discomfort zone, the more your comfort zone will expand.

Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.