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Epictetus5 quotes
For it is impossible for any one to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows. — Epictetus · 108Were I a nightingale, I would sing like a nightingale; were I a swan, like a swan. But as it is, I am a rational being, therefore I must sing hymns of praise to God. — Epictetus · 108Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things are either what they appear to be; or they are neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task. — Epictetus · 108What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows. — Epictetus · 108Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?"-A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised; careful resolution; unerring decisions. — Epictetus · 108Henry David Thoreau4 quotes
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851In Wildness is the preservation of the World. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. — Henry David Thoreau · 1851Joshua Reynolds4 quotes
Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect itself unseen. — Joshua Reynolds · 1774It is the very same taste which relishes a demonstration in geometry, that is pleased with the resemblance of a picture to an original, and touched with the harmony of music. — Joshua Reynolds · 1776The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter. — Joshua Reynolds · 1774If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. — Joshua Reynolds · 1769John Ruskin3 quotes
Taste...Is the only morality...Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. — John Ruskin · 1864Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. — John Ruskin · 1864Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness. — John Ruskin · 1872Ralph Waldo Emerson3 quotes
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1864T.H. Huxley3 quotes
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. — T.H. Huxley · 1880It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. — T.H. Huxley · 1880If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger? — T.H. Huxley · 1877Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel2 quotes
What experience and history teach is this-that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1830It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1830Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.2 quotes
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1880The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1880Vladimir Nabokov2 quotes
A most conventional way to rise above the conventional. — Vladimir Nabokov · 1948Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. — Vladimir NabokovWerner Heisenberg2 quotes
Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created. — Werner Heisenberg · 1958Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer... We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg · 1956William Thomson, Lord Kelvin2 quotes
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin · 1883When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin · 1883Adolf Loos1 quote
Cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use. — Adolf Loos · 1910Albert A. Michelson1 quote
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. — Albert A. Michelson · 1899Alfred North Whitehead1 quote
The religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1925Arthur Eddington1 quote
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars. — Arthur Eddington · 1926Ayatollah Khomeini1 quote
If laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need... After establishing a government, to sit down and draw up laws. — Ayatollah Khomeini · 1970Carl Jung1 quote
Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt. — Carl Jung · 1935Daniel Patrick Moynihan1 quote
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan · 1985Ernest Renan1 quote
To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again-these are the essential conditions for the making of a people. — Ernest Renan · 1882Flannery O'Connor1 quote
While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. — Flannery O'Connor · 1960Friedrich Hayek1 quote
I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. — Friedrich Hayek · 1973Friedrich von Schelling1 quote
Architecture in general is frozen music. — Friedrich von Schelling · 1803George McGovern1 quote
The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina. — George McGovern · 1973Henry Maine1 quote
War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. — Henry Maine · 1887Hugh Blair1 quote
In some men only the feeble glimmerings of Taste appear; the beauties which they relish are of the coarsest kind; and of these they have but a weak and confused impression, while in others, Taste rises to an acute discernment, and a lively enjoyment of the most refined beauties. — Hugh Blair · 1787Hugo Black1 quote
It is my belief that there are "absolutes" in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be "absolutes." — Hugo Black · 1960Isaiah Berlin1 quote
One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. — Isaiah Berlin · 1958James Clerk Maxwell1 quote
The opinion seems to have got abroad, that, in a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals. — James Clerk Maxwell · 1871John Seeley1 quote
We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. — John Seeley · 1881Joseph Stalin1 quote
The State is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class. — Joseph Stalin · 1924