Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via – There is no easy way from the earth to the stars
He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.
It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test? …Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.
Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face
We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
A truth that’s told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent.
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!
You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
What really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was, ‘We’ll build it and you buy it. We’ll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.’
This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.
I don’t play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody?
Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy today. But—is there anything at all left today in which man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands interest?
The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.
Life is so transient and ephemeral; we will not be here after a breath. So think better, think deeply, think with kindness, and write it with love so that it may live a little longer.
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the hour of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
I always wanted to see if I could sell a movie to the public without doing any marketing because my philosophy was like, ‘Hey man, I’m reaching my audience everyday. I’m twittering with them. I’m in direct contact with them on the podcast.’
My father has been my role model. And I always looked up to him – be it his management philosophy or his approach towards life.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Children are like sponges; they start to smell after a little while.
The road ahead is long and there will be many setbacks. Success is not assured… but the price of failure has never been this high.
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
As a dad, he thinks that his philosophy is morally correct. He has no conscience whatsoever about letting his kids put a penny in a light socket to find out electricity is not so good for you, and if you want to learn how to swim, you have to be thrown into the deep end.