Favorite Quotations

"We are what we repeatedly do."
- Aristotle

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
- Yogi Berra

"People who are successful have learned how to fail."
- Kevin Bickart

Our finding that greater social connectedness could be explained by increases in intrinsic amygdala connectivity within the social affiliation network but not intrinsic connectivity within the mirroring or mentalizing networks, supports the hypothesis that decoding others’ feelings is distinct from decoding their thoughts or beliefs and further that the former is particularly important for maintaining more relationships with people in more social groups. This also highlights a potential division of labor within the social brain between brain regions that support hot and cold aspects of social cognition.
- Ibid.

"See the false as false - the true as true. Look into your heart."
- Buddha

"For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."
- Christ

"The teacher and the taught together create the teaching."
- Eastern saying

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."
- Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
- Ibid.

"The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one..."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."
- Ibid.

"Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh."
- Ibid.

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
- Ibid.

"He who has more obedience than I masters me."
- Ibid.

"The ancestor of every action is a thought."
- Ibid.

"There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task."
- Ibid.

"To different minds, the same world is a hell and a heaven."
- Ibid.

"All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to the idea of creation."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, (3)

"Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it [nature] is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit."
- Ibid., (34)

"That which intellectually considered we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself."
- Ibid., (15)

"A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit."
- Ibid., (19)

"Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise."
- Ibid., (39)

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature."
- Michael Faraday

"When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as well to express them so --- translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we might also work upon them by experiment?"
- Michael Faraday, to James Clerk Maxwell in 1857

"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right."
- Henry Ford

"Life is not about getting what you want, but wanting what you already have."
- Devone Fitzpatrick

"Before you can do something, you must first be something."
 - Goethe

"Whatever you can do or dream you can - begin it.
Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it."
 - Ibid.

"The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you."
- Kendall Hailey

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude."
- William James

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."
- Helen Keller

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."
- Helen Keller

"The force that lifts the tree, lifts the smile."
- Andrew Leaf

..."Piaget (1951) explains fantasy in children's play primarily as an attempt to 'assimilate' experience into existing structures in the child's mind with minimal needs to 'accomodate' to the demands of external reality."
- Thomas W. Malone, "Toward a Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction", Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA 94304, COGNITIVE SCIENCE 4 (333-369) (1981)

"It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a discoverable law, yet have a mystery to move in."
- James Clerk Maxwell

"...Faraday, in his mind's eye, saw lines of force traversing all space where the mathematicians saw centres of force attracting at a distance. Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance... Faraday's methods resembled those in which we begin with the whole and arrive at the parts by analysis, while the ordinary mathematical methods were founded on the principle of beginning with the parts and building up the whole by synthesis."
- Ibid.

"... I soon found myself focusing on more mundane objects closer to home. A dead wasp on my towel rack...a pink tulip in the miniature lawn...the shiny bell of my bicycle. And it wasn't long before I found myself pleasantly surprised by all the pictures I could make of seemingly routine subject matter. In an ordinary blossom, bone, or shadow resided a fascinating calm for me. And inevitably I concluded: There's no need to seek hyperbole in order to praise the earth."
- John Nichols, from the introduction to "Keep It Simple"

"Hold a true friend with both your hands."
- Nigerian proverb

"To be a good scientist, or to have a scientific attitude toward the world, one must be able to imagine wonderful things - even things that seem too wonderful to be true."
- Chet Raymo, "Dr. Suess and Dr. Einstein", Orion, Vol. 12, Number 2, Spring 1993

"What at this moment is lacking?"
- Zen Master Rinzai

"The heart has its reasons in which reason cannot understand."
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees, Part IV, #277

"What is the I? Suppose a man puts himself at a window to see those who pass by. If I pass by, can I say that he placed himself there to see me? No; for he does not think of me in particular. But does he who loves someone on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the small-pox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more. And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this I, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities."
- Ibid., Part V, #323

"No compulsory learning can remain in the soul. . . In teaching children, train them by a kind of game, and you will be able to see more clearly the natural bent of each."
- Plato, The Republic, Book VII

"SOCRATES: You are a young rogue, as I said a moment ago, Menon, and now you ask me if I can teach you, when I tell you there is no such thing as teaching, only remembering. I see you want to show me up at once as contradicting myself. ...

... SOCRATES: Then in one who does not know, about things he does not know, there are true opinions about the things which he does not know?

MENON: So it appears."
- Plato, Meno (81B - 86E)

"To be or not to be.

Whether 'tis nobler in the minds of men to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and thus by opposing end them."
- William Shakespeare

"In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z."
- Dr. Suess, On Beyond Zebra

"The Sufi is the son of time present."
- Sufi saying

"Pale kuna nia, kuna njia"
"Where there is a will, there is a way."
- Swahili saying

"I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there."
- Mother Teresa

"The simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think; but because they don't know how to stop thinking."
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

"Know, first, that heav'n, and earth's compacted frame,
And flowing waters, and the starry flame,
And both the radiant lights, one common soul
Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole.
This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space,
Unites and mingles with the mighty mass.
Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain,
And birds of air, and monsters of the main."
- Virgil, The Aeneid

"Keep It Simple

Strike three.
Get your hand off my knee.
You're overdrawn.
Your horse won.
Yes.
No.
You have the account.
Walk.
Don't walk.
Mother's dead.
Basic events
require simple language.
Idiosyncratically euphistic
eccentricities are the
promulgators of
triturable obfuscation.
What did you do last night?
Enter into a meaningful
romantic involvement
or
fall in love?
What did you have for
breakfast this morning?
The upper part of a hog's
hind leg with two oval
bodies encased in a shell
laid by a female bird
or
ham and eggs?
David Belasco, the great
American theatrical producer,
once said, 'If you can't
write your idea on the
back of my calling
card,
you don't have a clear idea.' "
- United Technologies Corporation, Hartford, Connecticut 06101, A message as published in the Wall Street Journal.

"We cherish our friends, not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to be amused by them..."
- Evelyn Waugh

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the
journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a
grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the
highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the
parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to
scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head
surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-
threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds
all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for
good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire
it."
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (31)

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, ... It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth."
- Walt Whitman

"Fall and the net will appear."
- Zen saying

"If not now, when?"
- Zen saying

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."
- author unknown

"As young Pascal sought divinity,
he approached the plane at infinity.
So he left from the left
and flew all night;
and by morning by God,
he returned from the right."
- author unknown

"Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say."
- author unknown

"If I don't contradict myself, it doesn't sound thoroughly true."
- author unknown

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
- author unknown

Top