Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m as confused as anyone else.”

— Sam Harris

302. “A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.”

— Sam Harris

303. “Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do?”

— Sam Harris

304. “We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.”

— Sam Harris

305. “Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”

— Sam Harris

306. “More than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.”

— Sam Harris

307. “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance – and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.”

— Sam Harris

308. “Does any piece of writing speak for itself? Or do we impose certain values and judgements on that text when interpreting it?”

— Sam Harris

309. “Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.”

— Sam Harris

310. “Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.”

— Sam Harris

311. “The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.”

— Sam Harris

312. “On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That’s terrifying.”

— Sam Harris

313. “Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.”

— Sam Harris

314. “When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. A commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.”

— Sam Harris

315. “IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.”

— Sam Harris

316. “My four-year-old son and I have little in common. Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time.”

— Sam Harris

317. “The point, of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning – norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties.”

— Sam Harris

318. “Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty – but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives. To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.”

— Sam Harris

319. “Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.”

— Sam Harris

320. “I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or of female genital mutilation, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that moral relativism does nothing to diminish a person’s commitment to making the world a better place.2.”

— Sam Harris

321. “It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another.”

— Sam Harris

322. “If you’re suffering, you’re thinking.”

— Sam Harris

323. “And the fact that millions of people use the term “morality” as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.”

— Sam Harris

324. “Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.”

— Sam Harris

325. “To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true.”

— Sam Harris

326. “Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms – but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics.”

— Sam Harris

327. “Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.”

— Sam Harris

328. “The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth.17 Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.”

— Sam Harris

329. “If lying seems the only option, given your fear or physical limitations, it clearly shifts the burden of combating evil onto others.”

— Sam Harris

330. “God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. There.”

— Sam Harris

331. “It seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And.”

— Sam Harris

332. “Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point – and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds – and lives – are largely shaped by how we use them.”

— Sam Harris

333. “Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism is a well-recognized obstacle to scientific reasoning, and yet, because scientists have been reluctant even to imagine that they might have something prescriptive to say about values, dogmatism is still granted remarkable scope on questions of both truth and goodness under the banner of religion.”

— Sam Harris

334. “I still find that a willingness to be honest – especially about things that one might be expected to conceal – often leads to much more gratifying exchanges with other human beings.”

— Sam Harris

335. “It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There.”

— Sam Harris