Quotes

Here’s some quotes that I like, find funny, inspiring and/or thought provoking.

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith doe not prove anything.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.” — George Bernard Shaw

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” — Ansel Adams

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” — Robert Frost

“A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one’s life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself.” — Louis L’Amour

“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” — Charlotte Bronte

“A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.” — Ansel Adams

“Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.” — Gary Zukav

“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind…” — Aristotle

“Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.” — Evan Esar

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Dr. Seuss

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” — Seneca

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” — Malcolm Forbes

“Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about other people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.” — Tao Ching

“Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose you ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.” — Thomas J. Watson

“Girls are always running through my mind. They don’t dare walk.” — Andy Gibb

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” — Douglas Adams

“Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” — E. B. White

“I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.” — Robert Capa

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” — Lillian Hellman

“I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.” — James Thurber

“I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS.” — Robert Bakker

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” — Gerry Spence

“If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?” — Laurence J. Peter

“If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.” — Emerson Pugh

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” — Robert Capa

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.” — Carl Sagan

“In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” — Alec Bourne

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places.” — E. Joseph Cossman

“Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.” — Charles Dickens

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” — Abraham Lincoln

“Obsessions and fixations are not really my field. All I know, when the mind really grabs hold of something, look out.” — Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman

“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.” — Leonardo da Vinci

“Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.” — Ivan Pavlov

“Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.” — Richard Feynman

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.” — Christopher Morley

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Sir Richard Steele

“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.” — Ashley Montague

“Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.” — Henri Poincare

“Science is good furniture for one’s upper chamber, if there is common sense below.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.” — Thomas H. Huxley

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” — Immanuel Kant

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.” — Helen Keller

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” — Carl Jung

“The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.” — Frank Herbert

“The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” — Thomas H. Huxley

“The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.” — P. B. Medawar

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.” — Sir William Bragg

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” — H. P. Lovecraft

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” — Hannah Arendt

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett

“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Treat the other man’s faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine.” — Henry S. Haskins

“When you make a mistake, don’t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.” — Hugh White