The Little Retreat Quotes: Science, Religion, Doubt
Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent
full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
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
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
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
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
Robert Frost
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
Kahlil Gibran