- Cervantes
Whatever you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
- Gandhi
Your silence will not protect you.
- Audre Lorde
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw
Who struggles can fail. Who doesn't struggle has already failed!
- Bertolt Brecht
Man and things. -- Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
- from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 483, R.J. Hollingdale transl.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
- George Bernard Shaw
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
- Plato
Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth.
- Albert Pike
Wisdom is the conqueror of fortune.
- Juvenal
Call him wise whose actions, words, and steps are all clear because to a clear why.
- Lavater
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.
- Henry David Thoreau
It is not speech which we should want to know: we should know the speaker.
It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer.
It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer.
It is not the mind which we should want to know: WE SHOULD KNOW THE THINKER.
- "Kaushitaki Upanishad." The Upanishads. Trans. Juan Mascaro. Penguin Books, New York: 1965. 107.
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
- Jorge-Luis Borges, "The Avatars of the Tortoise"
The fuzzy principle states that everything is a matter of degree.
- Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
I know not what course others may take, but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!
- Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything we usually think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.
- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
And we should consider every day lost
on which we have not danced at least once.
And we should call every truth false
which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
- Voltaire
We had better live as we think, otherwise we shall end up by thinking as we have lived.
- Paul Bourget
As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.
- Voltaire
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending to much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson on the encroachments of state governments
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, priviledges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but is essential for right thinking; where it is absent discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
- Leo Tolstoy, On Life and Essays on Religion
A poet once said, "The whole univers is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood...How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide the glass of wine, this universe, into parts--physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on--remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview--nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
- Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack
The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.
- Dr. John A. Wheeler
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
- Jules Feiffer
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.
- Mario Cuomo
Superstitions typically involve seeing order where in fact there is none, and denial amounts to rejecting evidence of regularities, sometimes even ones that are staring us in the face.
- Murray Gell-Mann, Quark and the Jaguar