Thoughts
Each piece of the wide array
of knowledge our species has collected, originated at some point
from someone who had spent some time thinking about some particular
topic long enough to make a discovery. The success of our
civilization is built upon the thoughts of such people. It is the
act of in-depth thought that allows our species to survive. In order
for us to continue to survive and progress we must consider the
thoughts of previous thinkers, and adopt the knowledge they acquired
through that very process.
In this article I have made a list of some great
quotes that offer us a glimpse into the thinking process of others. Consider
the possible thoughts behind each quote. The quotes I have listed
generally pertain to a mind-set
of reason, rational thought, and logical
perspectives. These mind-sets are usually what appeal to me the
most.
"The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become." -(Charles Dubois)
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -(Charles Darwin)
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." -(Charles Darwin)
"The computer programmer is a creator of universe for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops." -(Joseph Weizenbaum)
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." -(Albert Einstein)
"You could wake up dead
tomorrow."
-(Homer Simpson)
"Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that." -(Richard Dawkins)
"You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the bunsen burner - in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture." -(Richard Dawkins)
A man said to the universe
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
-(A poem by Stephen Cane)
"The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large." -(Louis Pasteur)
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." (-Eleanor Roosevelt)
"We cannot begin to know anything until we realize we know nothing." -(Socrates)
"Philosophers have long noted that their children were born into a more complex world than that of their ancestors. This early and perhaps even unconscious recognition of accelerating change may have been the catalyst for much of the utopian, apocalyptic, and millennialist thinking in our Western tradition. But the modern difference is that now everyone notices the pace of progress on some level, not simply the visionaries." -(John Smart)
"Few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating" -(Ray Kurzweil)
"Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money." -(George Carlin)
"The capacities of intelligence form a sort of spectrum which extends from what we may call an infra-emotional to an ultra-reason range. At the infra-emotional extreme lie the perceptions set in motion by music and by lyrical poetry. At the opposite end- that of pure reason - is placed the perceptional capacity for mathematics. Between the two there is a wide range of overlapping where art is scientific and science artistic." -(Hans Zinsser)
"Now part of my consciousness live on the internet and seems to stay there all the time.... A student may have a textbook open. The television is on with the sound off.... They've got music on headphones ... there's a homework window, along with e-mail and instant messaging.... One multi-tasking student prefers the online world to the face-to-face world. "Real life," he said, "is just one more window." -(Christine Boese, Reporting on findings by MIT professor Sherry Turkle.)
"Those who dare to fail
miserably can achieve greatly."
-(Robert F. Kennedy)
"Forgive your enemies, but
never forget their names."
- (John F. Kennedy)
"Excellence is an art won by
training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have
virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted
rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an
act but a habit."
- (Aristotle)
"The truth is, everybody is going to hurt you .... you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for" -(Bob Marley)
"Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother." -(Susan B. Anthony)
"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?" -(Chuck Palahniuk)
"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." -(Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998)
"Anyone who is not shocked by the quantum theory does not understand it." -(Niels Bohr)
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about "and"." -(Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington)
"In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won't be there to see it- but it's why we live, why we work. It's why we suffer. We're creating it. That's the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal." -(Three Sisters, act 2, By Anton Chekhov)
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." -(E.O. Wilson)
"Talent hits a target no one
else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
-(Arthur Schopenhauer)
"It’s better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you’re stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." —(Mark Twain)
"How simple it is to see that all the worry in the world cannot control the future. How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now. And that there will never be a time when it is not now." -(Gerald Jampolsky)
"No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion." -(Carrie Chapman Catt)
"What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them..." -(Sanderson Oundle)
"All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond it's income." -(Samuel Butler)
See posting: "Thoughts -2" for more quotes.
A great place to look up quotes for reference is: http://www.brainyquote.com/