Nesse Quotes & Sayings

If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer. — Randolph M. Nesse

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. — Kathryn Schulz

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind. — Eric Hansen

The head of state Has called for me by name But I don't have time for him It's gonna be a glorious day I feel my luck could change — Thom Yorke

But last fall, your belief that you knew her was shattered. You went for a visit without announcing it beforehand, and you discovered that you had become a guest. Mom was continually embarrassed about the messy yard or the dirty blankets. At one point, she grabbed a towel from the floor and hung it, and when food dropped on the table, she picked it up quickly. She took a look at what she had in the fridge, and even though you tried to stop her, she went to the market. If you are with family, you needn't feel embarrassed about leaving the table uncleared after a meal and going to do something else. You realized you'd become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life. — Kyung-Sook Shin

Nesse's research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it's stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism - and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It's to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can't realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy ... — Jane McGonigal

Love had sneaked up on us rather than bursting upon us like cannons and fireworks. — Carrie Vaughn

And your three-year-old Ford Explorer," Terezin said, "bought without your parents' money, a proud statement of your independence - of course it has a GPS. — Dean Koontz

Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine. — Randolph M. Nesse

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction - just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success. — Randolph M. Nesse

Every textbook description of a disease should have, in our opinion, a section devoted to its evolutionary aspects. This section should address the following questions: 1. Which aspects of the syndrome are direct manifestations of the disease, and which are actually defenses? 2. If the disease has a genetic component, why do the responsible genes persist? 3. Do novel environmental factors contribute to the disease? 4. If the disease is related — Randolph M. Nesse

I don't believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening. — Elena Ferrante

The body is a bundle of careful compromises. — Randolph M. Nesse

It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad; I found this far more disquieting than the alternative. — Neil Gaiman

Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs. — Randolph M. Nesse

Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature - the physical - is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, "hyperphysical," or, shifting into Latin, super naturam. — David Bentley Hart

I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. — Randolph M. Nesse

There are no footprints on the sea and no road-signs, not a single guard-stone or post, and no bends, only paths of light and dark from which to choose, the choice is always a difficult navigation and the storm's wingspan immeasurable as the depths and the horizon, but the sea holds you in its mighty hand your life is a sea-blue tale of love and death. — Ase-Marie Nesse

The trouble is small, the fun is great. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Seeing her was a key turned in a rusty lock and now all his gears were churning. — Suanne Laqueur

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another. — Marquis De Condorcet

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now? — Joanna Russ

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want. — Robin Nagle

Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. — Randolph M. Nesse