Search

Quotes in
Sorted by
Author
Subject
Text
2401 quotes  
We need to learn how to want what we have NOT to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the self-reliance of every one of its members.
If we value our children, we must cherish their parents.
I think it is always important to ask fundamental questions, but when we do ask a fundamental question, most of us are seeking an answer, and then the answer is invariably superficial because there is no yes or no answer to life. Life is a movement, an endless movement, and to inquire into this extraordinary thing called life, with all its innumerable aspects, one must ask fundamental questions and never be satisfied with answers, however satisfactory they may be, because the moment you have an answer, the mind has concluded, and conclusion is not life - it is merely a static state. So what is important is to ask the right question and never be satisfied with the answer, however clever, however logical, because the truth of the question lies beyond the conclusion, beyond the answer, beyond the verbal expression. The mind that asks a question and is merely satisfied with an explanation, a verbal statement, remains superficial. It is only the mind that asks a fundamental question and is capable of pursuing that question to the end - it is only such a mind that can find out what is truth.
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.
TACT: The art of saying nothing when there is nothing to say.
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.
I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.
People are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity, they will act like machines.
I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends.
To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.
Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.
The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
You are going to pay a price for every thing you do and every thing you don't do. You don't ge to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take.
The poet must not cross an interval with a step when he can cross it with a leap.
It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.
The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. 
We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.
BORE: A person who deprives you with solitude without providing company.
Before you can see the Light, you have to deal with the darkness.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations,you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.
Having been unpopular in high school is not a just cause for book publication.
Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Biologically, life is not maintenance or restoration of equilibrium but is essentially maintenance of disequilibria, as the doctrine of the organism as open system reveals. Reaching equilibrium means death and consequent decay. Psychologically, behaviour not only tends to release tensions but also builds up tensions; if this stops, the patient is a decaying mental corpse in the same way a living organism becomes a body in decay when tensions and forces keeping it from equilibrium have stopped.
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings to others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like, emerges…. It is absurd to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the individual human organism; for, although it has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily social.
Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
The only place where I can go into my own world is in my journal. Everywhere else is the place where I go into the world of others.
We must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious'.
When you love, you are not lonely. The sense of loneliness arises only when you are frightened of being alone and of not knowing what to do. When you are controlled by ideas, isolated by beliefs, then fear is inevitable; and when you are afraid, you are completely blind.
The new comes out of the random.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
If you ask for something you have to say "Please", if you want to get something you have to please.
Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.
The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.
The existentialist declares willingly that man is anguish.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too
A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do. 
Better to be disliked than pitied.
Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
To make changes you have to make some enemies, but you also have to be careful not too make too many enemies. He made far too many enemies.
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
It isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts.
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.'... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time....Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i. e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder."
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
We are here to make another world.
A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization, (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past.
Theory is when we know everything but nothing works. Praxis is when everything works but we do not know why. We always end up by combining theory with praxis: nothing works and we do not know why.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.
There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up.
There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
Psycho-galvanic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the 'me', whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.
Men's maxims reveal their characters.
If I forgot what I have not been, I would forget myself.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
2401 quotes