Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. G. K.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. G. K.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

When I say I believe in a square deal i do not mean ... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.

[He was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. Thomas H.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood

My tongue will tell the anger of mine heart, Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

You are the most beautiful girl that has ever lived, and it is worth dying to have kissed you.

But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it ? three minutes; to collect the data in it ? all my life

If you have a harem of 40 women, you never get to know any of them very well.

I violated the Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.

Nurture your mind with great thoughts for you will never go any higher than what you think.

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

I’d like to be the person I could have been but never was.

I have lost the half of myself ? a soul for which mine was made.

Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the Centre.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.