Browse Quotes

618 quotes in the collection

• There is a sense in which we always move from one world to another incommensurable world. We do pass between worlds as we pass from home to office or to classroom. There are no smooth transitions between them, and we do damage by failing to notice…

  Thomas Kuhn

• People's trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

  Socrates

• How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times 70 skins and still not be able to say: ‘This is really you, this is no longer an outer shell. Besides, it is an…

  Friedrich Nietzsche

• Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they…

  James Salter

• I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?

  W. Somerset Maugham

• When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing…

  Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

• Stop looking all around the world, just think about where you are, or some project that you really care about, and roll up your sleeves and do something about that.

  Jane Goodall

• Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone…

  Daniel Burnham

• I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

  Iris Dement

• We buy books because we believe we are buying the time to read them.

  Warren Zevon

• “Dum volvo video disco”

  Latin for “while I turn I see and learn”

• If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that…

  David Bowie

• Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.

  Philip K. Dick

• Veritas...is the reason we exist, to seek the truth. Over time, truth is revealed; it needs to be tested on the anvil of competing ideas. If you really seek the truth, you must engage with those who think differently than you. Even more importantly,…

  Bacow, 2022

• You have to make the daring attempt to make yourself as big as you actually are, to catch up yourself. Widen your moral fantasy. Widen your sense of time. Don’t be a coward. Say to yourself upon awakening: ‘It is our business.’  The…

  Günther Anders

• What is very obvious to any practicing forest ecologist is that intact, less disturbed forest communities include high levels of biodiversity and demonstrate greater resilience and resistance to disturbance (fire, wind, disease). In other words,…

  Cenzot, NY Times reader

• Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself.

  Maria Popova

• If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I…

  Robin Wall Kimmerer

• What I cannot create, I do not understand.

  Richard Feynman

• Every storm begins with one gust of wind, and every flood begins with a single drop of rain.

  Hopi saying