Words of Wisdom
All Stories
“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.”
– Khalil Gibran
“The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.”rn rn― Abigail Van Buren
“Tectonic plates move and that’s a fact and the world is getting warmer because of human activity. That’s a fact. If you had somebody who really strongly believed the earth was flat, you wouldn’t have to have that person on a television show with the people who believe the earth is round.”
– Bill Nye
“I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.”
– Vernor Vinge
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anais Nin
Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
Amadeus by Milos Forman, Screenplay by Peter Shaffer
“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice.” – Margaret Heffernan
Image courtesy of mheffernan.com
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
– Carl Sagan
“I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don’t trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.” – John Cusack
“If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.” – Geoffrey Fletcher
“Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.” – Christopher Nolan
“My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.” – Alain de Botton
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” – Bertrand Russell
“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” – Edmund Burke
“One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.”
– George Eliot
“There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” – Carl Jung
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” – Immanuel Kant
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
– William Butler Yeats
“To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals – that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.”
– Honore de Balzac
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or to be the mirror that reflects it.” – Edith Wharton
“A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.” – Rita Mae Brown
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.” – H.G. Wells
“The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.” – Dean Acheson
“Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” – Jules Henri Poincare
“I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.”
– John F. Kennedy