Recent experiments have shown that you can exert up to 15 percent more strength, and lift more weight, if you will shout, grunt, or groan loudly as you make the lift. The explanation of this is that loud shouting disinhibits and allows you to exert all your strength, including that which has been blocked off and tied up by inhibition.
Psycho-Cybernetics
Maxwell Maltz
In fact, if you really think about it, a life made of goals is going to be disappointing. Yes, it might propel you forward, keep you turning the pages of your own existence, but ultimately it will leave you empty. Because even if you achieve your goals, what then? You may have gained the thing you lacked, but with it, what then? You either set another goal, stress about how you keep the thing you attained, or you think – along with the millions of people having mid- (or early- or late-) life crises right now – This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy? So what was Schopenhauer’s answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up.
Reasons to Stay Alive
Matt Haig
One can now see why all bodies fall at the same rate: a body of twice the weight will have twice the force of gravity pulling it down, but it will also have twice the mass. According to Newton’s second law, these two effects will exactly cancel each other, so the acceleration will be the same in all cases.
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
THE ISS IS A ONE-MILLION-POUND SPACESHIP that’s the size of a football field, including the end zones, and boasts a full acre of solar panels. Inside, there’s more living space than you’d have in a five-bedroom home. It’s so big, with so many discrete modules, that it’s possible to go nearly a full day without seeing another crewmate.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
Chris Hadfield
The doctrine of atonement, which Christians take very seriously indeed, is so deeply, deeply nasty that it deserves to be savagely ridiculed. God is supposed to be all-powerful. He created the expanding universe, galaxies hurtling away from one another. He knows the laws of science and the laws of mathematics. He invented them, after all, and he presumably even understands quantum gravity and dark matter, which is more than any scientist does. He makes the rules. The one who makes the rules has the power to forgive whomever he likes for breaking them. Yet we are asked to believe that the only way he could think of to persuade himself – himself – to forgive humans for their sins (most notably the sin of Adam, who never existed and therefore couldn’t sin) was to have his son (who was also himself) tortured and crucified in the name of humanity.
Outgrowing God
Richard Dawkins