“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person. True nobility is being superior to your former self.”
- Hindu Proverb
“I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you… stranger.”
- Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight
“The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists exists; what is is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced. Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality–it is our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.”
- Richard Rahl in the Sword of Truth series, by Terry Goodkind
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
“The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
- Samuel Butler
“There are causes worth dying for but none worth killing for.”
- Albert Camus
“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”
- Ashley Montague
“We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.”
- Spider Robinson
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
- Siddhartha Gautama
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
- Winston Churchill
“If God would concede me His omnipotence for 24 hours, you would see how many changes I would make in the world. But if He gave me His wisdom too, I would leave things as they are.”
- J.M.L. Monsabre
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
- G.K. Chesterton
“Some people complain because God puts thorns on roses, while others praise God for putting roses among thorns.”
- Unknown
“Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don’t wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.”
- Peter Kreeft
“If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”
- Evelyn Underhill
“Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man but it would deteriorate the cat.”
- Mark Twain
“It is easy — terribly easy — to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
- Albert Einstein
“The average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.”
- Anatole France
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
“The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.”
- Aldous Huxley
“I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.”
- Frank Moore Colby
“Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase ‘being born’ is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while ‘dying’ means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.”
- Ovid
“The true poet and the true scientist are not estranged. They go forth into nature like two friends. Behold them strolling through the summer fields and woods. The younger of the two is much the more active and inquiring; he is ever and anon stepping aside to examine some object more minutely, plucking a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird, watching a butterfly; now he turns over a stone, peers into the marshes, chips off a fragment of rock, and everywhere seems intent on some special and particular knowledge of the things about him. The elder man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and enjoyment, is less curious about special objects and features, and more desirous of putting himself in harmony with the spirit of the whole. But when his younger companion has any fresh and characteristic bit of information to impart to him, how attentively he listens, how sure and discriminating is his appreciation! The interests of the two in the universe are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile or mutually destructive.”
- John Burroughs
“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.”
- John Von Neumann