Many quotes thought provoking Some comical others, advise hard learned.

	Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
	There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
	"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
	All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss.
	This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

 

What you think means more than anything else in your life. More than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

	Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power - that is not easy.
	The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
	"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, desire."
	"It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want."
	"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."
	All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
	The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
	Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.

	The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'
	Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

	"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it."
	"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

	A thing is not necessarily false because it is badly uttered, nor true because it is spoken magnificently.
	Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first or second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, without damaging the wood.

	"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
	"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
	God doesn't play dice with the universe. [Also quoted as "I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe."]
	God may be subtle, but He isn't plain mean. [Also found as "God is subtle, but he is not malicious."]
	"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
	"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish."
	"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible."
	"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
	"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
	Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.
	The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
	Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
	The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
	I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.
	"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
	A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
	"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
	When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.

 

	"When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Never the less, no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."
	"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
	"Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality."
	"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."
	"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
	"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 my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
	"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."
	"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
	"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma. If there's any religion that would hope to meet the scientific need it will be Buddhism...."

"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind. ... it is only to the individual that a soul is given. And the high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to impose himself in any other way."

 

	"Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man."
	"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance -- but for us, not for God."
	"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
	"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress .... If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover (the) rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusion. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain, is moved by the profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason, incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life."
	"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."
	"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

 

	"We all know, from what we experience with and within ourselves, that our conscious acts spring from our desires and our fears. Intuition tells us that that is true also of our fellows and of the higher animals. We all try to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant. We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation. At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on. All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions. All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us. Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us. The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolical devices. Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions. In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts. But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts."
	"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."
	"A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy."
	"Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people."
	"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others."
	"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within."
	"It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth."

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

 

	"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism"
	"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."
	"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."
	"The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man." Quoted in: Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, chapter. 5 (1979).
	"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
	"Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."
	"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty ."

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

 

	"The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?"
	"The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family as bearer of tradition and education has become weakened. The continuance and health of human society is therefore in a still higher degree dependent on school than formally."
	"With the affairs of active human beings it is different. Here knowledge of truth alone does not suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continuously threatened with burial by the shifting sands. The hands of science must ever be at work in order that the marble column continue everlastingly to shine in the sun. To those serving hands mine also belong."
	"One should guard against inculcating a young man or woman with the idea that success is the aim of life, for a successful man normally receives from his peers an in comparably greater portion than the services he has been able to render them or deserve. The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving. The most important motive for study at school, at the university, and in life is the pleasure of working and thereby obtaining results which will serve the community. The most important task for our educators is to awaken and encourage these psychological forces in a young woman or man. Such a basis alone can lead to the joy of possessing one of the most precious assets in the world - knowledge or artistic skill."
	"Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift."
	"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."
	"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
	"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person."
	"We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity ..... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.
	"(1) Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labor of all. (2) The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable precondition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself is not enough. In order to be content men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accord with their personal characteristics and abilities."
	"If the possibility of the spiritual development of all individuals is to be secured, a second kind of outward freedom is necessary.  The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterized as inward freedom. It is this freedom of the spirit which consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from un-philosophical ritualizing and habit in general.  This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy object for the individual."

Making allowances for human imperfections, I do feel that in America the most valuable thing in life is possible; the development of the individual and his creative powers.

 

"I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

	The life that is unexamined is not worth living.
	"Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another." -- [The Republic. Book VII. 529]
	"And what is good, Phaedrus? And what is not good? Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" -- [Symposium]
	We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
	Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
	I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly combat.
	Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
	Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
	The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
	They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

	Love truth, but pardon error. Discours sur l'Homme. Discours 3.
	Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.
	Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
	Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
	Life resembles the banquet of Damocles; the sword is ever suspended.
	He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
	"No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking."
	Without philosophy we should be little above animals.
	If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
	If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

	"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to get down off this featherbed of civilization and to find the globe granite underneath and strewn with cutting flints."
	A friend is a present you give yourself.
	To be what we are, an to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
	The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

 

	Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
	He is richest who is content with the least.
	He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
	Here are Socrates' two simple rules for life: Know Thyself, Take nothing in Excess
	If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.