I realise there have been some previous threads over the years, but none recently that I’m aware of (and a lot has been published in recent years).
I’d also like to know specifically ones that are inspiring and thought provoking.
[Question] What quotes do you find most inspire you to use your resources (effectively) to help others?
This thread was a moving read. Thanks Luke for starting it, and to those who contributed. The intended effect of the quotes worked on me, and I hope my work will be better for it, if only for a while.
I agree. I have read only a few but I am crying as they are very moving and inspiring. This is the combined effect of their beauty and strength with my attachment to this community that shares my values. I will keep reading them in the next few days…
Indeed! Thanks for all these great contributions! It was a great start to my morning 😍
“One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
Terry Pratchett (character is Lord Vetinari), Unseen Academicals
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
“With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”
- Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography.
George Bernard Shaw (on moral reflection/holding unusual values):
“The fact that we can become accustomed to anything [...] makes it necessary to examine everything we are accustomed to.”
Nick Bostrom (on seeing the better world we could have):
“Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.”
Bryan Caplan (on epistemic modesty):
“Look in the mirror. You don’t know the best way to deal with Russia.”
Arcade Fire, “Month of May”:
I said some things are pure, and some things are right
But the kids are still standing with their arms folded tight
[...]
Well, I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light
But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?
J.R.R. Tolkein:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music” (on defeating death):
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Strong upvote for Month of May.
From Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning:
“What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people’s joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.”
“This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers — they always feel that strangers, like compatriots in war, are their own people. They know that there are always those as urgently in need as the victims of battle, and they consider themselves conscripted by duty.”
“Do-gooders learn to codify their horror into a routine and a set of habits they can live with. They know they must do this in order to stay sane. But this partial blindness is chosen and forced and never quite convincing.”
Another quote by MacFarquhar on Parfit:
”As for his various eccentricities, I don’t think they add anything to an understanding of his philosophy, but I find him very moving as a person. When I was interviewing him for the first time, for instance, we were in the middle of a conversation and suddenly he burst into tears. It was completely unexpected, because we were not talking about anything emotional or personal, as I would define those things. I was quite startled, and as he cried I sat there rewinding our conversation in my head, trying to figure out what had upset him. Later, I asked him about it. It turned out that what had made him cry was the idea of suffering. We had been talking about suffering in the abstract. I found that very striking.
Now, I don’t think any professional philosopher is going to make this mistake, but nonprofessionals might think that utilitarianism, for instance (Parfit is a utilitarian), or certain other philosophical ways of think about morality, are quite unemotional, quite calculating, quite cold; and so because as I am writing mostly for nonphilosophers, it seemed like a good corrective to know that for someone like Parfit these issues are extremely emotional, even in the abstract.
The weird thing was that the same thing happened again with a philosophy graduate student whom I was interviewing some months later. Now you’re going to start thinking it’s me, but I was interviewing a philosophy graduate student who, like Parfit, had a very unemotional demeanor; we started talking about suffering in the abstract, and he burst into tears. I don’t quite know what to make of all this but I do think that insofar as one is interested in the relationship of ideas to people who think about them, and not just in the ideas themselves, those small events are moving and important.”
“No, I do not really hear the screams of everyone suffering in Hell. But I thought to myself, ‘I suppose if I tell them now that I have the magic power to hear the screams of the suffering in Hell, then they will go quiet, and become sympathetic, and act as if that changes something.’ Even though it changes nothing. Who cares if you can hear the screams, as long as you know that they are there? So maybe what I said was not fully wrong. Maybe it is a magic power granted only to the Comet King. Not the power to hear the screams. But the power not to have to.” -The Comet King, a character in Unsong
And later iirc “maybe not needing to hear their screams is what being the comet king means.”
“When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”
—
Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons
“Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
(In case any future readers are wondering, this quote is from Derek Parfit.)
“One day we … may have the luxury of going to any length in order to prevent a fellow sentient mind from being condemned to oblivion unwillingly. If we ever make it that far, the worth of a life will be measured not in dollars, but in stars.
“That is the value of a life. It will be the value of a life then, and it is the value of a life now.
“So when somebody offers $10 to press that button, you press it. You press the hell out of it. It’s the best strategy available to you; it’s the only way to save as many people as you can. But don’t ever forget that this very fact is a terrible tragedy.
“Don’t ever forget about the gap between how little a life costs and how much a life is worth. For that gap is an account of the darkness in this universe, it is a measure of how very far we have left to go.”
- Nate Soares, The Value of a Life
Another one from this post:
”There may well come a day when humanity would tear apart a thousand suns in order to prevent a single untimely death.
That is the value of a life.”
“if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it”
Hear hear.
“Take pride in noticing when you are confused, or when evidence goes against what you think. Rejoice when you change your mind.”
This is great. Did you write this?
Yeah, though it’s of course heavily inspired by things people say on LessWrong. Thanks! It was one of my wedding vows.
Agreed. it makes life so much easier and more enjoyable.
Ben West from an interview I conducted a long time ago.
I just stumbled across this on my Facebook newsfeed eradicator today and it reminded me of the inspiring quotes thread:
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world.”
~ Anne Frank
There’s a powerful poem in my native language (Irish) that was published in 1971, whose title loosely translates to “Indifference cannot be permitted”. It calls for equality, compassion, and our obligation towards people in all parts of the world, people with mental illness, non-human animals, and (depending on how one translates) possible life beyond earth. It was my first introduction to principles such as those that underpin EA. I won’t try to translate it, but it’s talked about (and part of it translated) in a recent blog post here: https://www.ria.ie/news/membership-policy-and-international-relations/ni-ceadmhach-neamhshuim
“One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider.” -Yudkowksy
From The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing, the winner of the recent creative writing contest.
“Few people are actually trying to do good. The best explanation for most people’s behavior—even when they think they are trying to do good—is that they are trying to feel good and look good.”
Unfortunately I do broadly agree.
I am quite open about the fact that doing good makes me feel good, my reasoning is that if I feel good then I perform better, therefore enabling me to make more money to do more good. I use the Kahneman Happiness model and Paul Zak’s neuroeconomics research to support my approach.
Can we make doing good cool maybe?
There are actually two struggles between good and evil within each person. The first is the struggle to choose the right path despite all the temptations to choose the wrong path; it is the struggle to make actions match words. The second is the struggle to correctly decide which path is right and which is wrong. Many people who win one struggle lose the other. Do not lose sight of this fact or you will be one of them.
What’s the source of this quote? The only reference I could find was another post.
I made it up, but it’s inspired by reading this short story. (I have a stash of quotes I find inspirational, and sometimes I make up stuff to put in the stash. Having to come up with wedding vows was part of my motivation.)
“If you get the right answer to the wrong question, you still die.”—Van Jones
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 47: Personhood Theory
A few more wonderful quotes from HPMOR:
”And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been… But the stars are so very, very far away… And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.
Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful. And Harry couldn’t understand Professor Quirrell’s words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn’t be forced to operate in that mode.
You couldn’t leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.
You had to stay and fight.”
″Every time you spend money in order to save a life with some probability, you establish a lower bound on the monetary value of a life. Every time you refuse to spend money to save a life with some probability, you establish an upper bound on the monetary value of life. If your upper bounds and lower bounds are inconsistent, it means you could move money from one place to another, and save more lives at the same cost. So if you want to use a bounded amount of money to save as many lives as possible, your choices must be consistent with some monetary value assigned to a human life; if not then you could reshuffle the same money and do better. *How very sad, how very hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can ever be compared, when all they’re doing is forbidding the strategy that saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding...*”
from https://lyricstranslate.com/en/Solo-le-pido-Dos-I-only-ask-God.html
from Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra (The Way of the Bodhisattva) by Śantideva
Here’s a collection of quotes tagged by Goodreads users with “effective altruism”, which I assume they often tagged after finding them inspirational.
“Be as you wish to seem”—attributed to Socrates by the sorts of sources whose quote attributions I don’t trust
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”—perhaps Arleen Lorrance (perhaps influenced by an statement from Gandhi)
(As a teenager, I found these quotes quite inspiring. I’ve rarely thought about them for the last 5+ years. But that might just be because the ideas that they express are now sufficiently absorbed into my mindset that it doesn’t seem necessary to think about the quotes anymore.)
Here are some ‘EA’ related quotes I have collected—not sure if any are useful for your particular case, but figured it was best to share them anyway!
There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.
— Albert Einstein...
He is the most beloved of God who does most good to God’s creatures.
— Muhammad (c. 570-632 A.D.)...
There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided; there is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. If we behave rationally and humanely; if we concentrate coolly on the problems that face all of humanity, rather than emotionally on such nineteenth century matters as national security and local pride; if we recognize that it is not one’s neighbors who are the enemy, but misery, ignorance, and the cold indifference of natural law—then we can solve all the problems that face us. We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all.
—Isaac Asimov...
The Precipice
Toby Ord
Cicero wrote: “The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them.”
“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.” -Miyamoto Musashi
-Joseph Carlsmith, On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism
This post was only published recently and I only read it today, so I can’t yet say that this inspired me to use my resources to effectively help others. But I think the sort of idea it points to has indeed inspired me, and I found that passage excellent and expect it will inspire me in future.
(Note that the original post contains some caveats, e.g. “To be clear: this is some mix between thought experiment and fantasy. It’s not a forecast, or an argument. In particular, the empirical picture I assumed above may just be wrong in various key ways.”)
“The mark of a civilised person is the ability to look at a column of numbers and weep.”
Bertrand Russell
“Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.”
Mahatma Ghandi
“It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”
H. G. Wells
“Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation.”
Alasdair Gray
”Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory.”
Irena Sendler
“Why should costs and benefits receive less weight, simply because they are further in the future? When the future comes, these benefits and costs will be no less real. Imagine finding out that you, having just reached your twenty-first birthday, must soon die of cancer because one evening Cleopatra wanted an extra helping of dessert. How could this be justified?”
Derek Parfit
—Thomas Babington Macaulay
—Henry Sidgwick
—Alphonse Daudet
—Albert Einstein
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney
“I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good person, you see yourself.” In the film Kundun on the life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
I found this video on youtube truly amazing and motivating. It is a collection of some awesome quotes with great music that inspires a lot. Sharing it for everyone’s benefit:
“Although Dirac rejects religious faith, he accepts that another faith is needed to replace it, something to make human life, effort and perseverance worthwhile. This leads him to his credo, one that would later influence his thinking on cosmology:
In my case this article of faith is that the human race will continue to live for ever and will develop and progress without limit. This is an assumption that I must make for my peace of mind. Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.”
- From the book ‘The Strangest Man’
“There is a genius for impoverishment always at work in the world. And it has its way, as if its proceedings were not only necessary but even sensible. Its rationale, its battle cry, is Competition.”
— Marilynne Robinson
Little Things by Julia A. F. Carney
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Thus the little minutes,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of eternity.
“Politics is the mind-killer.” -Yudkowsky
I was browsing videos on YT and saw this video on my feed. Speak 5 lines to yourself every morning. it reminded me of the inspiring quotes.