The Little Retreat Quotes: Science, Religion, Doubt
Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
Sir J. Arthur Thomson says: "Science as science never asks the question Why?
That is to say, it never inquires into the meaning, or significance, or purpose
of this manifold Being, Becoming, and Having Been." And he continues: "Thus
science does not pretend to be a bedrock of truth." "Science," he tells us,
"cannot apply its methods to the mystical and spiritual." Professor J. S. Haldane
holds that "it is only within ourselves, in our active ideals of truth, right,
charity, and beauty, and consequent fellowship with others, that we find the
revelation of God." Dr. Malinowski says that "religious revelation is an experience
which, as a matter of principle, lies beyond the domain of science."
Bertrand Russell
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent
full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Adam Smith
Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
Miguel de Unamuno
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
Miguel de Unamuno
If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never
says anything at all.
Miguel de Unamuno
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide
You can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them.
Albert Einstein
It does not really matter WHO is right, it is WHAT is right that makes the difference.
Unknown
Do not guess. Measure.
Unknown
For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is
nevertheless satisfied with himself for he has no desire for that of which he
feels no want.
Plato, Symposium
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
Robert Browning
Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.
Charles Darwin
Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held
ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies...
and often dangerous ones. Once vast numbers of people have come to
believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves
into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself. The world,
then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original
insight. Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it
really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new
metaphor for explanation and guidance.
Bill Bonner
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone.
Thomas Jefferson
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of
this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the
pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate
profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover,
this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the
world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to
put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.
Norbert Wiener, I am a Mathematician, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1956
I am particularly lucky that it has not been necessary for me to remain
for any considerable period a cog in a modern scientific factory, doing
what I was told, accepting the problems given me by me superiors, and
holding my own brain only in commendam
as a medieval vassal held his field. If I had been born into this
latter day feudal system of the intellect, it is my opinion that I
would have amounted to little. From the bottom of my heart I pity the
present generation of scientists, many of whom, whether they wish it or
not, are doomed by the "spirit of the age" to be intellectual lackeys
and clock punchers.
Norbert Wiener, I am a Mathematician, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1956
Research is to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgi
People will do anything within their power to avoid thinking.
Unknown
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to
whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand
rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
John Naisbitt
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken
God made me an atheist. Who are YOU to argue with Him?
An Unknown Atheist
Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.
Socrates
Not seeing God in all is not seeing God at all.
A Sikh Preacher on Canadian TV about July 8, 2009
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and
has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the
unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.
Bertrand Russell
It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.
Isaac Asimov
The Great God Science. It has failed us, because it was never meant to be a
god, but only a few true scientists understand that.
Madeleine L'Engle
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
Robert Frost
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
Kahlil Gibran