Smarts Don’t Guarantee Success. Only a Hunger to Win Can. Take it from a 19-year-old college graduate. Brandon Adams says that most poker players, like financial traders, have sharply analytical […]

Anxiety is typically a helpful evolutionary tool, but it can sometimes become a pathology.

History is littered with prejudiced ideas that use Darwin to claim legitimacy.

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

Words of wisdom from Cuban national hero José Martí: "A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."

What makes a great artist? According to French writer Émile Zola, it's talent coupled with tenacity.

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."

Words of wisdom from the great composer and pioneer of ethnomusicology: "Competitions are for horses, not artists."

Words of wisdom from Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, the founder of ethnomusicology: "In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."

"So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories."

"There’s a very basic human, nonverbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements; it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual."

"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."  

A quote from author Joyce Carol Oates: "The worst cynicism: a belief in luck." She believes hard work and tenacity are the main ingredients for success. Do you agree?

Words of wisdom from the American author (and prolific tweeter): "Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."

Is it our cognition or wonder that elevates us to the ranks of humanity? According to the late fantasy author Terry Pratchett, our imagination is what sets us apart.

Words of wisdom from Nikola Tesla: "There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact."

"I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. ... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything."

There's a reason Tesla is so in vogue right now. The dude was basically science's Nostradamus, predicting globalized wireless communication nearly eight decades before it came to fruition.

"A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature." — Nikola Tesla, 1893

Words of wisdom from American aviator Amelia Earhart: "Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do."