Some of my favorite quotes

“We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.” - Norman Mailer

“Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” - Mark Twain

“When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.” - William Arthur Ward

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein

“Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.” - Henry Emerson Fosdick

“The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Persistent people begin their success where others end in failures.” - Edward Eggleston

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.” - Jonathan Kozol

“Show me a man with both feet on the ground, and I’ll show you a man who can’t put his pants on.” - Arthur K. Watson

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.” - Arthur Koestler

“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.” - Mark Twain

“O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen!” - Michel de Montaigne

“Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.” - Marcus Aurelius

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” - Helen Adams Keller

“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” - Soren Kierkegaard

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.” - Tony Hoare

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” - Heraclitus

“Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.” - Abraham Lincoln

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” - Mark Twain

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

“If words are to enter men’s minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men’s defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.” - J.B. Phillips

“A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.” - Sydney J. Harris

Do not praise yourself
not slander others:
There are still many days to go
and any thing could happen.

Kabir

“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” - Thomas Jefferson

“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” - Bertrand Russell

“New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, ``Why then are you not taking part in them?’’” - H.G. Wells

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” - Henry David Thoreau

“Noise proves nothing—often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.” - Mark Twain

“It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” - Alfred Adler

“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.” - Helen Adams Keller

“One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.” - Stephen Hawking

“Knowing all truth is less than doing a little bit of good.” - Albert Schweitzer

“If a man points at the moon, an idiot will look at the finger.” - Sufi wisdom

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.” - Chuang-tzu

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” - Francis Bacon

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.” - Paul Tournier

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.” - George Bernard Shaw

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” - Charles F. Kettering

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” - Marcus Aurelius

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.” - Robert F. Kennedy

“You can achieve anything you want in life if you have the courage to dream it, the intelligence to make a realistic plan, and the will to see that plan through to the end.” - Sidney A. Friedman

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” - William Arthur Ward

“For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his [or her] happiness on major events like a great job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.” - Andy Rooney

“Most of my major disappointments have turned out to be blessings in disguise. So whenever anything bad does happen to me, I kind of sit back and feel, well, if I give this enough time, it’ll turn out that this was good, so I shouldn’t worry about it too much.” - William Gaines

“If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.” - Norman Cousins

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” - Carl Jung

“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” - George Sand

“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” - Josh Billings

“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” - Epictetus

“The future must be seen in terms of what a person can do to contribute something, to make something better, to make it go where he believes with all his being it ought to go.” - Frederick R. Kappel

“We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.” - William Arthur Ward

“If you don’t make a total commitment to whatever you’re doing, then you start looking to bail out the first time the boat starts leaking. It’s tough enough getting that boat to shore with everybody rowing, let alone when a guy stands up and starts putting his life jacket on.” - Lou Holtz

“At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.” - John Berger

“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.” - Jim Valvano

“When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.” - Alexander Graham Bell

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” - Niels Bohr

“Life is a long lesson in humility.” - James Barrie

“The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.” - Hugh Black

“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” - Isaac Newton

“A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living.” - Henry David Thoreau

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” - Rabindranath Tagore

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers… Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.” - Francois Fenelon

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.” - Victor Hugo

“People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.” - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

“A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations.” - Bertrand Russell

“The journey into self-love and self-acceptance must begin with self-examination. … until you take the journey of self-reflection, it is almost impossible to grow or learn in life.” - Iyanla Van Zant

“Walking is also an ambulation of mind.” - Gretel Ehrlich

“The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.” - Giovanni Ruffini

“How often is it a phantom woman who draws the man from the way he meant to go? So was man created, to hunger for the ideal that is above himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a girl rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned her, and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of idolatry that is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on their way to God. But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when he wakens from his dream. The nobler his ideal, the further will he have been hurried down the wrong way, for those who only run after little things will not go far. His love may now sink into passion, perhaps only to stain its wings and rise again, perhaps to drown.” - James Barrie (The Little Minister, Chapter 1: The Love-Light)

“The praise that comes of love does not make us vain, but humble rather. Knowing what we are, the pride that shines in our mother’s eyes as she looks at us, is about the most pathetic thing a man has to face, but he would be a devil altogether if it did not burn some of the sin out of him.” - James Barrie

“Yet if he upbraided her in his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next, and to feel its effects more than she, temper being a weapon that we hold by the blade.” - James Barrie

“A great writer has spoken sadly of the shock it would be to a mother to know her boy as he really is, but I think she often knows him better than he is known to cynical friends. We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.” - James Barrie

“So Babbie loved the little minister for the best that she had ever seen in man. I shall be told that she thought far more of him than he deserved, forgetting the mean in the worthy: but who that has had a glimpse of heaven will care to let his mind dwell henceforth on earth? Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover’s privilege.” - James Barrie

“When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.” - Confucius

“The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.” - John Vance Cheney

“There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.” - Aristotle

“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” - Wayne Dyer

“Security is not the meaning of my life. Great opportunities are worth the risk.” - Shirley Hufstedler

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.” - Erma Bombeck

“Without danger you cannot get beyond danger.” - George Herbert

“If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” - Rabbi Harold Kushner

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” - Tom Robbins

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.” - Adlai E. Stevenson

“No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.” - George Eliot

“Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.” - Carl Jung

“Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.” - Jack Canfield

“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.” - Robert Anthony

“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.” - Mother Teresa

“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” - Henri Frederic Amiel

“What we wish, that we readily believe.” - Demosthenes

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” - Demosthenes

“Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.” - Mark Twain

“There’s as much risk in doing nothing as in doing something.” - Trammel Crow

“We must travel in the direction of our fear.” - John Berryman

“How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.” - Stephen Covey

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a month, get married. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.” - Chinese Proverb

“Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” - David Lloyd George

“Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.” - Brian Tracy

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make a mistake.” - Elbert Hubbard

“Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.” - Germain de Stael

“Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth—and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.” - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“The mind cannot long act the role of the heart.” - Francois de la Rochefoucauld

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” - Henry David Thoreau

“Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.” - Victoria Holt

“We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions.” - Dorothy Day

“There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first. When you learn to live for others, they will live for you.” - Paramahansa Yogananda

“Playing it safe is the riskiest choice we can ever make.” - Sarah Ban Breathnach

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” - Henry Van Dyke

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars.” - Walt Whitman

“People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.” - Stephen R. Covey

“Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God.” - Peace Pilgrim

“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When you don’t know what harbor you’re aiming for, no wind is the right wind.” - Seneca

“The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.” - Herbert Sebastian Agar

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“We are no longer happy as soon as we wish to be happier.” - Walter Savage Landor

“To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.” - Theophile Gautier

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” - Andre Gide

“Figure out what your purpose is in life, what you really and truly want to do with your time and your life then be willing to sacrifice everything and then some to achieve it. If you are not willing to make the sacrifice, then keep searching.” - Quintina Ragnacci

“No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.” - Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.” - Kahlil Gibran

“When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world we lose connection with one another and ourselves.” - Jack Kornfield

“Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.” - Albert Schweitzer

“I have accepted fear as a part of life—specifically the fear of change. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.” - Erica Jong

“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.” - Tennessee Williams

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” - Norman Cousins

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” - Francis Bacon

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction” - E. F. Schumacher

“Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.” - Buddha

“Most people are paralyzed by fear. Overcome it and you take charge of your life and your world.” - Mark Victor Hansen

“…if there is sin against life, it lies in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.” - Albert Camus

“Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.” - Epicurus

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin

“One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past nor complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the very essence of life.” - Anatole France

“The first step toward change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change. That’s all you have to do. Change is not something you do, it’s something you allow.” - Will Garcia

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will avoid one hundred days of sorrow.” - Chinese Proverb

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” - Carl Bard

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” - Harry Emerson Fosdick

“You will never find time for anything. You must make it.” - Charles Buxton

“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” - Benjamin Disraeli

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” - Edwin Schlossberg

“Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.” - John Andrew Holmes

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” - Barnett Cocks

“It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.” - Mohandas K. Gandhi

“It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide what to do.” - Elbert Hubbard

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” - John Muir

“An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.” - Cato The Elder

“The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” - Moliere

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” - Edward Abbey

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” - Walt Whitman

“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.” - Alan Alda

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.” - Ovid

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’” - H.L.Mencken

“If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.” - Carl Jung

“How does one become a butterfly? … You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.” - Trina Paulus

“We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas, and not for things themselves.” - John Locke

“People change and forget to tell each other.” - Lillian Hellman

“Thank God I’m not a Jungian.” - Carl Jung

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done. Then they begin to hope it can be done. Then they see it can be done. Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.” - Frances Hodgson Burnett

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” - Robertson Davies

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” - Henry Winkler

“Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.” - Alfred A. Montapert

“Life is an adventure in forgiveness.” - Norman Cousins

“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.” - Max Reger

“If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” - Cardinal Richelieu

“Whenever you do things from your Soul, you feel a river inside, a joy.” - Rumi

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” - Emily Dickinson

“God is in you as the ocean is in the wave.” - Eric Butterworth

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.” - Meister Eckhart

“The world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.” - W. Somerset Maugham

“The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.” - Carl Jung

“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.” - Joseph Addison

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell (in The Triumph of Stupidity 10 May 1933)” - Bertrand Russell

“A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose.” - Chinese proverb

“Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, ‘War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.’” - Immanuel Kant

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” - Susan B Anthony

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“Punishment damages goodwill and self-esteem, and shifts our attention from the intrinsic value of an action to external consequences.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” - Miguel de Unamuno

“The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the founding of the world: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.” - Mircea Eliade

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” - Albert Einstein

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens….” - Carl Jung

“When we understand the needs that motivate our own and other’s behavior, we have no enemies.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“Everything has changed, except our way of thinking.” - Albert Einstein

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence, but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It’s never what people do that make us angry, it’s what we tell ourselves about what they did.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“Making a request without revealing the feeling/need takes all the joy out of other’s service.” - Lucy Leu

“You can never learn anything that is not a part of yourself.” - Louis Kahn

“The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” - Albert Einstein

“Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” - Henry David Thoreau

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.” - Oscar Wilde

“Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.” - Emily Kimbrough

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” - Albert Einstein

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

“Enlightenment must come little by little—otherwise it would overwhelm.” - Idries Shah

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” - Anon (many attributions)

“Humanity has been sleeping—and still sleeps—lulled within the narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In the depths of the human multitude there slumbers an immense spiritual power which will manifest itself only when we have learnt how to break through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise ourselves up to an entirely new perspective, so that habitually and in a practical fashion we fix our gaze on the universal realities.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” - James Barrie

“Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.” - Ambrose Bierce

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” - Voltaire

“People all say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” - Carl Jung

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.” - Albert Einstein

“Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old—old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don’t. In both cases we have to do something.” - Inga Teekens

“If you are inside of something, say an atom, you only see electrons whirling chaotically around you. If you moved outside the atom you would see those electrons moving with a pattern around the atom. If you rise further above you see that atoms are actually the building blocks of larger structures called molecules. And so it goes, on up the scale, ad infinitum. The ever familiar ‘forest from the trees’ syndrome. It’s all a matter of perspective. True creativity is allowing yourself to gain the loftiest perspective you can in relation to the object of your quandary or inquiry.” - J.L. Read

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” - Buddha

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.” - Philip Greenspun

“I don’t mind what happens.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.” - Gene Fowler

“The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” - Tacitus

“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” - Melvin Conway design systems communication organizations

“I did not fail two thousand times. I merely found two thousand ways not to make a lightbulb.” - Thomas Edison

“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” - Nikos Kazantzakis

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.” - Lao Tzu

“The best practice is inspired by theory.” - Donald Knuth

“The best theory is inspired by practice.” - Donald Knuth

“A moment’s thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.” - J. E. Houseman

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” - Lewis Carroll

“I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life—most of which never happened.” - Mark Twain

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

“Learning of all kinds goes on best, lasts best, and tends to lead itself on more when it grows out of a real focus of interest in the learner.” - Carl Rogers

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” - A N Whitehead

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” - William James

“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” - Albert Einstein

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” - Daniel J. Boorstin

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” - Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind)

“To get the viewpoint of the other person appreciatively and profoundly and reconcile it with his own so far as possible is the supreme achievement of man and his highest vocation.” - Henry Nelson Wieman

“I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” - Tony Hoare

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” - Tony Hoare

“Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.” - Dan Barker

“There’s only one wrong way to live and that’s unhappily.” - Patrick Elliott

“If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact.” - Yitzhak Rabin

“If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” - Lyndon Baines Johnson

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” - e.e. cummings

“To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” - Ambrose Bierce

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.” - Stephen Jay Gould

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” - Søren Kierkegaard

“There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” - Albert Einstein

“Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance.” - S. Leonard Rubinstein

“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.” - Albert Einstein

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

“Only short programs have any hope of being correct.” - Arthur Whitney

“The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.” - Thomas Kuhn

“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.” - Noam Chomsky

“Man’s ‘progress’ is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.” - Max Beerbohm

“Those who are enamored of practice without theory are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty where he is going. Practice should always be based on a sound knowledge of theory.” - Leonardo da Vinci

“IV.17 When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.” - Confucius

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“The data stream has been corrupted. Return to first principles.” - Terence McKenna

“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.” - Carl Gustav Jung

“The attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.” - Alan Watts

“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.” - Alan Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)

“The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it.” - Jacques Hadamard

“Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition.” - Jacques Hadamard

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” - Pablo Picasso

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” - Picasso

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.” - James Oppenheim

“As tedious as arguing about definitions is, it can’t hold a candle to arguing without definitions.” - David R MacIver

“On two occasions I have been asked,—‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” - Albert Einstein

“A variable is to data flow what GOTO is to control flow. Just as GOTO allows control to go anywhere, a variable allows data to go anywhere.” - Arch D Robinson

“Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.” - Albert Einstein

“Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.” - Wayne Dyer

“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” - Oscar Wilde

“Everything you can imagine is real.” - Pablo Picasso

“The moon could not continue shining if it had to pay attention to all the dogs barking at it.” - Anonymous

“The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.” - Will Durant

“Sometimes we do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions not answers.” - Le Carre

“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” - Richard Hamming

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” - William Butler Yeats

“The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.” - D.H. Lawrence

“Yo can’t reason someone out of something he didn’t reason himself into.” - Jonathan Swift (via Alfie Kohn)

“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.” - Edward R. Murrow

“What you already know is merely a good departure point.” - Keorapetse Kgositsile

“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.” - William Somerset

“Being attached to a speculation is not a good guide to research planning. One should always try both directions of every problem. Prejudice has caused famous mathematicians to fail to solve famous problems whose solution was opposite to their expectations, even though they had developed all the methods required.” - Anil Nerode (on P vs NP)

At this point I am reminded of the keynote speech of the then boss of IBM in France who addressed the audience at the 7th IEEE Logic programming conference in Paris. IBM prolog had added a lot of OO extensions, when asked why he replied: Our customers wanted OO prolog so we made OO prolog. I remember thinking “how simple, no qualms of conscience, no soul-searching, no asking ‘Is this the right thing to do’” … - Joe Armstrong Why OO Sucks

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” - Linus Pauling

“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.” - G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” - Rene Descartes

“I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution.” - Wernher von Braun

“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.” - Stephen Jay Gould

“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.” - Eckhart Tolle (thanks @ktotheb)

“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.” - Anthony de Mello

“I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.” - Alan Watts

“A question mark does not a question make.” - Anonymous (thanks @jakevsrobots)

“The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time.” - Caroline Myss

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” - Ursula K LeGuin (thanks @ktotheb)

“Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.” - Ram Dass (thanks @ktotheb)

“If extreme idealism isn’t working out for you, maybe it is because you are not wholeheartedly following your own ideals.” - Luke Palmer (blog post)

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world (- Mahatma Gandhi). As applied to software: design software as if it were the beautiful paradise you want it to be, then build pieces of the scaffolding back to the status quo.” - Luke Palmer (blog post)

“It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau

“The moment you realize you are not present, you are present.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.” - Eckhart Tolle

“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into aliveness, alertness, and creativity.” - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

“When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change. The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that ‘the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.’ If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into aliveness, alertness and creativity.” - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

“Change is painful, yet pain is changeful.” - Anonymous

“Observe your thoughts, don’t believe them.” - Eckhart Tolle

“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.” - Marshall B. Rosenberg

“We have produced many of our problems through our confused mental states.” - Tenzin Palmo

“If you want to enjoy intimacy, you must learn to enjoy pain.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.” - Alan Watts

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls,
something borrowed which we mistake as our own.
Ignorance is better than this; clutch at madness instead.
Always run from what seems to benefit your self:
sip the poison and spill the water of life.
Revile those who flatter you;
lend both interest and principal to the poor.
Let security go and be at home amidst dangers.
Leave your good name behind and accept disgrace.
I have lived with cautious thinking;
now I’ll make myself mad.

Rumi, Mathnawi II: 2327-2332, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, posted to Sunlight

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.” - Rudolf Bahro

“Everything is the same spirit watching itself through the eyes of different observers.” - Depak Chopra

“Love is the beginning of the journey, its end, and the journey itself.” - Depak Chopra

“Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.” - Thomas H. Huxley

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Hard writing is easy reading; easy writing is hard reading.” - E.B. White

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi

“Learning is remembering what you’re interested in.” - Richard Saul Wurman

“I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you’ve got to hook the fish.” - Buckminster Fuller

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anais Nin

“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” - Elbert Hubbard

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” - Chinese Proverb

“The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.” - Yogananda

“Perhaps you have moved away by standing still.” - Anonymous (via @ktotheb)

“A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.” - Stephen Toulmin (from “Human Understanding”)

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Are you willing to
let go of all you hold dear
to grasp what is real?
- N. Robison 01/01/09

“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinion for or against” - Osho (Rajneesh Chandra Mohan Jain)

“If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.” - Hsin Hsin Ming

“Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. Questioners sooner or later end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers. And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder.” - Osho

“He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.” - Raymond Hull

“Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open.” - Osho

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” - Carl Sagan

“Doubt everything. Find your own light.” - Buddha? (disputed)

- Lawrence Binyon

“Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.” - Lao-tzu

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - Krishnamurti

“Here it is—right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.” - Huang Po

“Dare to be naive.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat may come along and make a fortuitous life preserver. This is not to say, though, that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.” - Susanne Langer

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” - Marshall McLuhan

“Unless you have the courage to doubt you will never come to know the truth.” - Osho

“When your creative expressions match the needs of you fellow humans, then wealth will spontaneously manifest.” - Deepak Chopra

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.” - Ram Dass

“It is better to believe than to disbelieve, in so doing you bring everything to the realm of possibility.” - Albert Einstein

“The wise speak only of what they know.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

“I look into your eyes and see the whole universe, not yet born.” - Rumi

“Take sips of this pure wine being poured. Don’t mind that you’ve been given a dirty cup.” - Rumi

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci

“If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.” - Daniel Quinn (The Story of B)

“Don’t choose one side of the argument. Learn to take both sides & work towards the middle.” - Paul Ferrini

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” - Arthur C. Clarke

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart. If you want the truth to stand clearly before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease. — Zen master Sent-ts’an

“The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.” - George Leonard (1923-2010)

“Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.” - George Leonard

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists”. - Eric Hoffer

“This impure world that we presently experience exists only in relation to our impure mind.” - G. K. Gystso (maybe for a post on FP)

“You’re happiest while you’re making the greatest contribution.” - Robert F. Kennedy

“Don’t keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions.” - Buddha

“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.” - Abraham H. Maslow

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” - Edsger Dijkstra

“As is often the case with baffling errors it is really quite simple. We tend to fixate on incorrect assumptions, and overlook the obvious, surprisingly frequently. I have found that one way to break through such barriers is to use the ‘Spaniel’ method: Carefully explain the program to your dog. Since the dog knows nothing of programming, you must justify every statement you make. In the process you will often discover the mistake. (I know it sounds weird, but it really does work!)” - W. W. Waite (as quoted in “Literate Programming and the ‘Spaniel’ Method” by Nick Hatzigeorgiu and Apostolos Syropoulos)

“Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.” - Pythagoras

“Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity” (Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991).

“One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall” (Paul Valéry, Analecia, vol 14, 1970).

“Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.” - Pema Chödrön in When Things Fall Apart

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Soren Kierkegaard

“The 70% solution is usually the 40% solution, described by someone who can’t tell the difference.” - Gilad Bracha

“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” - Albert Einstein

“When you speak of love, please ask yourself: ‘Is my love free of conditions?’ When you speak of truth, please ask yourself: ‘Is my truth free of judgement or opinion?’ When you speak of essence, ask: `Am I attached to the way people perceive or receive me?’” - Paul Ferrini (From “I Am the Door: Exploring the Christ Presence Within”)

“A person is able to understand only when he solves the problem by himself.” - Peter Dunov

“Tears have cleansed my eyes, and errors have taught me the language of the hearts.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” - Charles Darwin

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.” - Charles Darwin

“The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” - Bertrand Russell (from “In Praise of Idleness”)

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.” - George Bernard Shaw

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly.” - G. K. Chesterton

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” - Jessica Hische

“It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.” - Claude Bernard

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” - Pablo Picasso

“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 world of achievement has always belonged to the optimist.” - J. Harold Wilkins

“A person hears only what they understand.” - Johann Wolfgang Goethe

“When you accept who you really are, your arguments with others cease.” - Paul Ferrini

“Self worth cannot be verfied by others” - Wayne W Dyer

“My commitment is to truth, not consistency.” - Gandhi

“Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.” - Wayne Dyer

“Beauty is a consequential thing, a product of solving problems correctly.” - Joseph Esherick

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” - G. K. Chesterton

“Belief is not merely an idea that the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind”. - Robert Bolt

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” - Erica Jong

“I use memories but I do not allow memories to use me.” - Shiva Sutras

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.” - Galileo Galilei

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It is not that he is ignorant, it is that so much of what he knows is not true.” - Mark Twain

“By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.” - Robert Allen

“The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.” - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.” - George Boole, The Laws of Thought

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” - John Stuart Mill

“In order to forgive you must have blamed. If you don’t blame there is nothing to forgive.” - Wayne Dyer

“If you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.” - Peter Dunov

“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.” - George Orwell “Politics and the English Language” 1946. (quoted)

“Nature is trying hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.” - Buckminster Fuller

“All things are difficult before they are easy.” - Thomas Fuller

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.” - George Bernard Shaw

“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” - Gandhi

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” - Philip K. Dick

“Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.” - Don Miguel Ruiz

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.” - Bertrand Russell

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” - Marshall McLuhan

“Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.” - Eckhart Tolle

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

“Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.” - James Harvey Robinson

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” - Buddha

“Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.” - Bertrand Russell

“Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.” - Fox Mulder

“Your commitment to other people must be an extension of your commitment to yourself, not at odds with it.” - Paul Ferrini

“Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’.” - Eckhart Tolle

“He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.” - Buddha

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” - Henri Bergson

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - Chinese Proverb

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” - Sinclair Lewis

“For as knowledges are now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver; for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may be best believed, and not as may be best examined; and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry.” - Francis Bacon

“Whatever people do, they do for a reason and they think that it meets their needs….by their perception.” - Anthony Robbins

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” - Plato

“When you stop projecting your anger & fear on the world, you can stand for truth without hurting others.” - Paul Ferrini

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” - William Blake

“To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.” - Confucius

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” - Henry Ford

“Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.” - Noam Chomsky

“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.” - Anaïs Nin

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Attention Deficit Disorder was coined by regularity chauvinists. Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.” - Ted Nelson (via Jake Elliott)

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” - Epictetus

“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.” - Alan J. Perlis

“Facts are God’s native tongue.” - Michael Dowd

“Our minds can shape the way a thing will be, because we act according to our expectations.” - Federico Fellini

“The deeper you surrender to existence, life, nature, the more loving, more understanding, more insightful you become.” - Osho

“The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.” - Arnold H. Glasow

“We criticize people for not giving us what we ourselves are afraid to ask for.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“You are not just a drop in the ocean, you the mighty ocean in the drop.” - Rumi

“The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.” - Deepak Chopra

“Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.” - Will Durant

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory” - Phil Wadler

“Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.” - Norman Douglas

“Hell is just resistance to life.” - Pema Chödrön

“If you don’t have the right abstractions, you can make things artificially difficult. For example, if I was going to teach arithmetic and I only knew about Roman numerals, you might get the idea that multiplication is extremely difficult. Given the idea of Arabic numerals it becomes a lot easier. If we took Roman numerals, the Romans have no way to express zero. It was just a sort of concept that didn’t exist so a whole branch of mathematics was not only difficult, it was impossible. If we have the wrong abstractions, we can make things which are intrinsically rather simple very difficult. I think that’s what’s happened in parallel programming. We’re using the wrong abstractions and that’s making things artificially difficult.” - Joe Armstrong

“The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.” - Shunryu Suzuki

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.” - Pema Chödrön

“Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?” - Pema Chödrön

“What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.” - Paul Valery

“The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity.” - M. Scott Peck

“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

“To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.” - Pema Chödrön

“There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.” - Dalai Lama

“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness—life’s painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose—you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.” - Pema Chödrön (Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living)

“Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.” - Pema Chödrön

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” - Charles Mingus (via Garr Reynolds)

“Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.” - Stanley Arnold

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” - Plato

“If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t you will see obstacles.” - Wayne W Dyer

“Only the closed mind is certain.” - from the movie Dean Spanley

“Right perspective is no perspective or all perspectives.” - Buddha (via Deepak Chopra)

“If you don’t like something, change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” - Engelbreit (via ktotheb)

“Paradoxes are only conflicts between reality and your feelings of what reality ought to be.” - Richard Feynman (via Luke Palmer)

“It is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It is because we dare not venture that they are difficult.” - Seneca

“In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness.” - Pema Chödrön

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.” - Peter Drucker

“Speak well of your enemies. After all you made them.” - Unknown

“Your problems are just old habit patterns, asking to be released.” - Karen Bell (KB, ktotheb)

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme.” - Mark Twain

“All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician and ridiculous to the philosopher.” - Lucretius

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” - Henry David Thoreau

“What we think, we become.” - Buddha (via Garr Reynolds)

“Complexity grows incrementally. Regaining simplicity requires a revolution.” - Conal Elliott

“How much ‘ego’ do you need? Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.” - Shunryu Suzuki

“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” - Christopher Columbus

“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” - André Gide

“A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.” - Alan Perlis

“So often I hear ‘The Real World’ as a static notion (e.g., ‘but in the Real World …’). I’m for helping the Real World evolve.” - Conal Elliott

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” - Charles F. Kettering

“The Corporate impulse for human uniformity instills shame at difference and, thus, the contemporary zeal for privacy.” - John Perry Barlow

“What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.” - Thaddeus Golas

“Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd” - William Wordsworth

“Everything you do consciously is preserved for you: everything you do mechanically, since you did not do it, is lost.” - Maurice Nicoll (Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, volume 1, page 95)

“We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.” - Pema Chödrön

“… inherited collective mind-patterns … have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.” - Eckhart Tolle

“They belong to what is as yet a small but fortunately growing minority of spiritual pioneers: people who are reaching a point where they become capable of breaking out of inherited collective mind patterns that have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.” - Eckhart Tolle

“The future is uncertain. But such uncertainty lies at the very heart of human creativity.” - Ilya Prigogine

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” - Abraham Lincoln

“One of my favorite problem solving questions: what if what I’m trying to solve isn’t actually a problem? What if I embraced it?” - Luke Palmer

“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.” - Carl Jung

“Your happiness depends on you alone.” - Aristotle

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” - Peter Drucker

“In a sense, recursive equations are the ‘assembly language’ of functional programming, and direct recursion the goto.” - Jeremy Gibbons

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” - Marcus Aurelius

“They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.” - Gerald Massey

“People who achieve access to the deepest roots of their freedom can completely change.” - Peter Koestenbaum

“It’s a healthy thing to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” - Bertrand Russell

“People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals that do not inspire them.” - Anthony Robbins

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” - Albert Einstein

“Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because have a universal human need for a witness.” - Roger Ebert.

“Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.” - Tim O’Reilly

“The truth is that good and bad coexist; sour and sweet coexist. They aren’t really opposed to each other.” - Pema Chödrön, (Start Where you Are)

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

“Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.” - Daniel C Dennett

“Every time you share your vision, you strengthen your own subconscious belief that you can achieve it.” - Jack Canfield

“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” - G.K. Chesterton

“A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month’s study of books.” - Chinese proverb

“You lose it if you talk about it.” - Ernest Hemingway

“You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.” - John Knox

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts” - Richard Feynman

“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” - Jean-Luc Picard

“Jump and the net will appear.” - Mick Ebeling

“Where is peace to be found? The answer is surprising but clear. In weakness. Why there? Because in our weakness, our familiar ways of controlling and manipulating our world are being stripped away, and we are forced to let go from doing much, thinking much, and relying on our self-sufficiency. Right there where we are most vulnerable, the peace that is not of this world is mysteriously hidden.” - Henri Nouwen

“The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.” - Ram Dass

“The first step in conflict is to shift from agree/disagree to trying to understand, what is the experience of the person saying this?” - MK (Miki Kashtan?)

“Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.” - Lindquist

“The stories we tell ourselves can serve as straitjackets for stagnation, or scaffolding for transformation.” - Seb Paquet

“Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.” - Hardy D. Jackson

“Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them” - Seth Godin

“The intellectual mind that is unconnected to the heart is an uncultivated mind.” - B.K.S. Iyengar

“Although we think that we think, most of the time we are being thought by the collective mind, the hypnosis of conditioning.” - Deepak Chopra

“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” - Naguib Mahfouz

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce

“Nowadays, when people assert that mutable state is really what happens on the machine, I ask them if they mean string theory or quantum field theory.” - Chung-chieh Shan

“It is so interesting to watch how every soul is looking for trouble. It is not so interesting that every person is seeking pleasure, but it is most interesting to see how everyone is seeking his pain, looking out for it. Tagore says: ‘When the string of the violin was being tuned it felt the pain of being stretched, but once it was tuned then it knew why it was stretched’. So it is with the human soul. While the soul goes through pain, torture and trouble it thinks that it would have been much better if it had gone through life without it. But once it reaches the culmination of it then, when it looks back, it begins to realize why all this was meant: it was only meant to tune the soul to a certain pitch.” - Hazrat Inayat Khan (source)

“There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“It is our duty as human beings to proceed as though the limits of our capabilities do not exist.” - Teilhard de Chardin

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” - William Shakespeare

“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” - John F Kennedy

“Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.” - William Blake

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become loyal to performing daily trivia until we become enslaved by it.” - Robert Heinlein

“When your judgements parade as the truth, you deceive everyone, including yourself.” - Paul Ferrini

“When the solution is simple, God is answering.” - Albert Einstein

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” - Hans Hofmann

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life.” - Joseph Campbell

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” - Mark Twain

“Don’t Take Yes for an Answer” - Anon

“The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.” - Edsger Dijkstra

“‘I don’t know’ is my favorite position.” - Byron Katie

“You are never upset for the reason you think.” - A Course in Miracles

“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” - Anatole France

“NVC is an awareness practice masquerading as a communication tool.” - Kit Miller

“Live out of your imagination, not your history.” - Stephen Covey

“The secret to creative freedom is letting go of our habitual certainities.” - Deepak Chopra

“When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.” - Deepak Chopra

“People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.” - Buckminster Fuller

“The chief source of problems is solutions.” - Eric Sevareid

“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.” - Ben Shneiderman

“I wake up every day both wanting to change the world and to have one heck of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.” - E.B. White

“If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.” - John Keats

“Do not confuse your horizon with the edge of the world.” - Seb Paquet

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” - Gandhi

“Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.” - Margaret Millar

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” - John von Neumann

“The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed—either by great suffering or by great love—or by both.” - Richard Rohr

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” - Howard Thurman

“An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.” - John Tukey

“Wisdom is what’s left after we’ve run out of personal opinions.” - Cullen Hightower

“FP offers a unique opportunity to exploit a compositional approach to algorithms and show the effectiveness of math in programming” - R. Bird

“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis—most of us only take the first or second steps.” - Edward Craig (@NewMindMirror)

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (or George Carlin? Uncertain)

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” - Rumi

“Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” - Anonymous

“You can’t come to a new point of view until you realize what your brainwashing has been.” - Morton Kelsey

“What we assume, what we have never clearly thought out, controls us.” - Morton Kelsey

“Honesty is not brutal. Brutality is not honest. If what you’re saying is brutal, you’re leaving unspoken a deeper, respectful truth.” - Dale Emery

“There is no security for those who seek it outside of themselves.” - Byron Katie

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton

“It is not that you must be free from fear. The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create resistance against fear. Resistance in any form does not end fear. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it.” - Krishnamurti

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it.” - Byron Katie

“The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.” - Eckhart Tolle

“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

“Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them in the name of morality.” - William Sloane Coffin

“The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn’t generally pass through meeting expectations.” - Ward Cunningham

“I don’t let go of my thoughts—I meet them with understanding, then they let go of me.” - Byron Katie

“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” - Pema Chödrön

“One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.” - Alan Perlis

“Wisdom is a love affair with questions. Knowledge is a love affair with answers.” - Julio Olalla (via Holly Croydon)

“What other people think about you is none of your business.” - unknown

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” - Anaïs Nin

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.” - Henry David Thoreau

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle

“In the future, we will hold jealousy as a call for support, not a proof of love. A love where no one sacrifices to another, but grace is evoked through the sharing of deep vulnerability.” - Kelly Bryson

“drop the story line, which means instead of acting out/repressing—use the situation as an opportunity to feel your heart, to feel the wound.” - Pema Chödrön

“Feel the wounded heart that’s underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.”- Pema Chödrön

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” - Ivan Illich

“Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.” - Derek Sivers

“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.” - Rachel Naomi Remen

“Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within another person.” - Rachel Naomi Remen

“When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.” - Rachel Naomi Remen

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it” - Alan Perlis

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” - Edsger Dijkstra

“The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.” - Tony Hoare.

“I think the terminology I would use is ‘a continuous process of reflection’. I’ve always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what’s really important to me and how these two intersect. It’s always been a reflective process—spiraling around these two poles.” - Peter Senge

“Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, live truly, and forgive quickly.” - Paulo Coelho

“Seeking love keeps you from the awareness that you already are it.” - Byron Katie

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” - Bertrand Russell

“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.” - Herbert Agar

“Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.” - H.A. Simon

“We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what is to come out of the future. We must acquire serenity in all feelings and sensations about the future. We must look with absolute equanimity to everything that may come and we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a world direction full of wisdom. It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely to live out of pure trust without any security in existence, trusting in the ever present help of the spiritual world. Truly nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail. Let us discipline our will and let us seek the awakening from within ourselves every morning and every evening.” - Rudolf Steiner

“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” - Gloria Steinem

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” - Steve Jobs

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” - Bertrand Russell “Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind” (1946)

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” - Bertrand Russell

“Dialogue requires space, time, and a calm spirit. People need to be given a chance to tune into themselves. Dialogue is a deep process. For me, this requires some quiet and inner peace—and some time for interaction.” - Bob Niederman

“If you can’t solve a problem, then there’s an easier problem you can solve: find it.” - George Pólya

“If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.” - Dr Suess

“We are all born originals—why is it so many of us die copies?” - Edward Young

“If I try to be like him, who will be like me?” - Yiddish proverb

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anaïs Nin

“Resentment is disappointment waiting to be felt. When you feel it, you move through to space, resolution and peace.” - Bridget Pilloud

“The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.” - Bertrand Russell

“As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.” - Mohandas K. Gandhi

“If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.” - Terence McKenna

“Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.” - Esther Hicks

“simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability…. Firstly, simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated. Secondly we observe massive investments in efforts that are heading in the opposite direction.” - Edsger Dijkstra

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” - C.S. Lewis

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ~Pema Chödrön (The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times)

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” - Richard P. Feynman

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.” - Buddha

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.” - Edsger Dijkstra

“If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies.” - Jon Stewart

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” - David Lynch

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” - Buckminster Fuller

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

“It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing. One of the central aims of the Programming Research Group as a teaching and research group has been to set up an atmosphere in which this separation cannot happen.” - Christopher Strachey (citation)

“People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.” - Terence McKenna

“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.” - Robert Brault

“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” - Mark Twain

“The more room you give yourself to express your true thoughts and feelings, the more room there is for your wisdom to emerge.” - Marianne Williamson

“Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.” - George Kneller

“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the”closed” mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the “open” mode—to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.” - John Cleese

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” - Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” - Picasso

“When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.” - Dr. Rollo May

“The joy is in creating, not maintaining.” - Vince Lombardi

“One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” - Albert Einstein

“It is the questions in life that move us forward, not the answers.” - Anon (heard a talk from Unity of Hawaii in a podcast about the Yin & Yang of attachment)

“A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.” - Horace Mann

“Self-judgment is how conditioned mind keeps control over your life.” - Cheri Huber

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measels of mankind. Never do anything against conscience—even if the state demands it.” - Albert Einstein

“To practice NVC, we must completely abandon the goal of getting other people to do what we want.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it.” - Eckhart Tolle

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” - Noam Chomsky

“There is no ethics in general. There are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.” - Alain Badiou, ‘Ethics’, 1993.

“As you inquire into issues and turn judgments around, you come to see that every perceived problem appearing ‘out there’ is really nothing more than a misperception within your own thinking.” - Byron Katie

“To ‘see both sides’ of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.” - Idries Shah

“If you want to enter a state of grace, question the assumption you’re defending right now.” - Byron Katie

“In that it dulls curiosity, the obvious is the enemy of the true.” - Conal Elliott

“My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea—she put her finger inside the cup.” - Flannery O’Connor

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

“Whenever you think that your needs are not being met, you’re telling the story of a future.” - Byron Katie

“Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” - Wayne W. Dyer

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” - Michelangelo

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” - W.B. Yeats

“People try nonviolence for a week, and when it ‘doesn’t work,’ they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.” - Theodore Roszak

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit” - E.E. Cummings

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experience the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.” - Gabrielle Roth

“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” - Benjamin Lee Whorf (Language, Thought, and Reality, 1964)

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.” - Alan Perlis

“As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.” - Eckhart Tolle

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” - Pema Chödrön

“First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.” - Eric Hoffer

“The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” - Lao Tzu

“William James used to preach the ‘will-to-believe.’ For my part, I should wish to preach the ‘will-to-doubt.’ None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.” - Bertrand Russell in “Sceptical Essays” (1928)

“There is a transcendental dimension beyond language…. It’s just hard as hell to talk about it.” - Terence McKenna

“Until you look forward to all criticism, your Work’s not done.” - Byron Katie (on Tumbler)

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

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“In the end only three things matter: how fully you have lived, how deeply you have loved and how well you have learned to let go.” - Buddhist saying

“The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, mono-medicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.” - Thomas Szasz

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” - George Orwell

“‘Rights’ are granted; ‘duties’ are enforced. To speak of rights and duties is to think in terms of authority.” - Laurence Labadie

“Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, ‘I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection’. I have dubbed this kind of fallacy ‘the Argument from Personal Incredulity’. Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.” - Richard Dawkins

Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back.
- Piet Hein

“Any story that you tell about yourself is food for the ego. There is no authentic story.” - Byron Katie

“The opinion other people have of you is their problem, not yours.” - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.” - Alan Watts

“Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem” - Russell Ackoff

“Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.” - Oscar Wilde

“It’s very dangerous to mix up the words natural and habitual. We have been trained to be quite habitual at communicating in ways that are quite unnatural.” - Mohandas K. Gandhi

“Types don’t just contain data; types explain data.” - Conor McBride (source)

“The word ‘choice’ is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.” - Idries Shah

“Exhale only love.” - Rumi

“Hand-waving is an important factor in staying stuck in impossibility thinking, since rigorous argument uncovers unconscious limiting assumptions. I’m just as happy if you are working on showing impossibility as discovering the possible, as long as you are rigorous and get rigorous peer review. Otherwise, we all fall into the trap of self-deceit.” - Conal Elliott (Source)

“It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.” - Wolfgang Pauli

“Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict from life, but the ability to cope with it.” - Unknown

“A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are for.” - John A. Shedd

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” - Alan Wilson Watts

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” - Dresden James

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” - Ray Bradbury

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” - Alan Watts

“Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself.” - Alan Watts

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” - Flannery O’Connor

“The obstacle is the path.” - Zen Proverb

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” - T. S. Eliot

“Silence is the best reply to a fool.” - Imam Ali

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” - Jack Kerouac

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” - Alejandro Jodorowsky

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.” - Lou Reed

“How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn’t matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it.” - Alexander Shulgin

“He who wants to get to the source must swim against the current.” - Stanislaw Lec

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” - Alberto Brandolini

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” - Alfred North Whitehead

“When I am with you, everything is a prayer.” - Rumi

“Only a Perfect One who is always laughing at the word two can make you know of Love.” - Hafiz

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

“Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” - Wayne Dyer

“Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people’s choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they’ve received and what problems they are facing.” - Michael Lerner

“It’s not good to settle into a set of opinions; it’s a mistake to put in effort and obtain some understanding and stop at that.” - Hagakure

“The question you raise ‘how can such a formulation lead to computations’ doesn’t bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand—and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.” - Alexander Grothendieck (in a letter to Ronnie Brown, December 4, 1983)

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” - Dalai Lama XIV (1935- )

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance” - George Bernard Shaw

“Can you remain unmoving / till the right action arises by itself?” - Lao Tzu

“The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go. The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.” - Atisha

“Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.” - Stephen Levine

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” - Alan Watts

“Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.” - Bertrand Russell, Can Religion Cure Our Troubles (1954)

“When your eyes are functioning well you don’t see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren’t working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don’t hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there’s something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes—it means something’s wrong with your functioning.” - Alan Watts (Ego - from the Essential Alan Watts)

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

“Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.” - Terence McKenna

“If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” - anon

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” - Alan Watts

“Don’t try to change people’s minds. People will change their own minds. Instead, design an experience that leads to a new way of thinking.” - Dave Gray

“Worry is preposterous; we don’t know enough to worry.” - Wei Boyang

“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” - Zen Proverb

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” - Lao Tzu

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.” - Bill Bullard

“I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination.” - Robert Anton Wilson

“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” - Aldous Huxley

“Though born a mortal like all others, Master had achieved identity with the Ruler of time and space. In his life I perceived a godlike unity. He had not found any insuperable obstacle to mergence of human with Divine. No such barrier exists, I came to understand, save in man’s spiritual unadventurousness.” - Paramhansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)

“disperse your money and attention with extreme miserliness when people start telling you they have the answers. There are no answers at this point. Part of growing up is to live without answers.” - Terence McKenna

“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.” - Carl Sagan

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” - Alan Watts

“It is foolish to answer a question that you do not understand.” - George Pólya

“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” - Robert Heinlein

“Programmers often think they want mechanisms that come from operational thinking. Part of the art of API design is saying ‘no’ at the right times, when it’s more helpful for the programmers to change their thinking.” - Conal Elliott

“The mystic has seen that the meaning of being alive is just to be alive. That is to say, when I look at the color of your hair and the shape of your eyebrow, I understand that their shape and color are their point. And this what we are all here for, as well: to be. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. The funny thing is, they are not even quite sure what they need to achieve, but they are devilishly intent on achieving it.” - Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

- William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

“Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement.” - Siddhārtha Gautama

“I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” - Marshall McLuhan (and others)

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” - William James

“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard P. Feynman

“Programming languages teach you not to want what they don’t provide.” - Paul Graham

“The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc’d to a Mathematical Reasoning; and when they cannot it’s a sign our knowledge of them is very small and confus’d; and when a Mathematical Reasoning can be had it’s as great a folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark, when you have a Candle standing by you.” - John Arbuthnot (Of the Laws of Chance; 1692)

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river-—-small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” - Bertrand Russell (seen on Brain Pickings)

“Every sufficiently good analogy is yearning to become a functor.” - John Baez

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

“Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” - Seng-ts’an

“Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90% of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So really, just make it beautiful!” - Joe Armstrong

“Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.” - Thomas Jefferson

“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” - Epitaph on the grave of Kazantzakis in Heraklion.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Here it is—right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.” - Huang Po

“The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.” - Unknown (Richard Feynman?)

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject. The actual enemy is the unknown.” - Thomas Mann

“The ego names our experience because it cannot directly live it.” - Eckhart Toelle

“Love yields to busyness. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then.” - Ovid, Remedia Amoris (via Julian Kain)

“The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them”grown up”. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.” - Attributed to but denied by Ursula Le Guin

“Without a specification, a system cannot be wrong, it can only be surprising.” - Gary McGraw

“Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do.” - Claude Shannon, quoted in A Mind at Play

“Physics is about precision of thought, which is aided and evidenced by precision of language.” - Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen from Forces of Nature

“Allow me a single paragraph of postgraduate-level physics. I want to take this liberty for two reasons. The first is that there is great joy to be had in understanding a complex idea, and in doing so glimpsing the underlying simplicity and beauty of Nature. The biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term ‘Ionian Enchantment’ for this feeling, named after Thales of Miletus, credited by Aristotle as laying the foundations for the physical sciences in 600 BC on the Greek island of Ionia. The feeling is one of elation when something about nature is understood, and seen to be elegant. The second reason is to revisit and enhance an idea we’ve been developing. Science is all about making careful observations and trying to explain what you see. That might be the hexagonal structure of a beehive, the jagged symmetry of a snowflake, or the details of how electrons bounce off protons. Careful observations lead to Ionian Enchantment.” - Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen from Forces of Nature

“A tremendous economy of description is one of the defining and most surprising features of modern science; it is not a priori obvious that a small collection of fundamental laws should be capable of describing the limitless complexity of objects that populate our universe, and yet this is what we have discovered over the last few centuries. Perhaps a universe regular enough to permit the existence of natural objects as complex as the human brain must be governed by a simple set of laws, but since we do not yet understand the origin of the laws, we do not know.” - Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen from Forces of Nature

“Science is delighted frustration. It is about asking questions, to which the answers may be unavailable—now, or perhaps ever. It is about noticing regularities, asserting that these regularities must have natural explanations and searching for those explanations.” - Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen from Forces of Nature

“It takes a lot of programming to get back from a little programming that deviates from mathematical logic.” - Xavier Leroy

“Direction is much more important than speed.” - Richard Feynman

“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” - Rumi

“To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.” - Isaac Newton

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” - Christopher Hitchens (“Hitchens’s razor”)

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” (ECREE) - Carl Sagan (the “Sagan standard”)

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.” - Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” - attributed to Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)

“In Galileo’s time, professors of philosophy and theology—the subjects were inseparable—produced grand discourses on the nature of reality, the structure of the universe, and the way the world works, all based on sophisticated metaphysical arguments. Meanwhile, Galileo measured how fast balls roll down inclined planes. How mundane! But the learned discourses, while grand, were vague. Galileo’s investigations were clear and precise. The old metaphysics never progressed, while Galileo’s work bore abundant, and at length spectacular, fruit. Galileo too cared about the big questions, but he realized that getting genuine answers requires patience and humility before the facts.” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (pp. 7-8)

“If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things, just accommodating them. Scientists use words like curve fitting and fudge factors to describe that sort of activity. Those phrases aren’t meant to be flattering. On the other hand, if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it has real power. You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted.” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

“Constructing profoundly simple theories of physics is an Olympian game in data compression. The goal is to find the shortest possible message—ideally, a single equation—that when unpacked produces a detailed, accurate model of the physical world. Like all Olympian games, this one has rules. Two of the most important are • Style points are deducted for vagueness. • Theories that make wrong predictions are disqualified.” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

“We must keep addressing new questions and strive for specific, quantitative answers. The phrase scientific revolution has been used for so many things that it has been devalued. The emergence of ambition to make precise mathematical world-models, and faith that one could succeed, was the decisive, inexhaustible Scientific Revolution.” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

“Toy models can be fun and useful. Similarly, in trying to understand complicated concepts or equations, it’s good to have toy models. A good toy model captures some sense of the real thing but is small enough that we can wrap our minds around it.” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

“We’ve been able to make short codes that describe large parts of reality fully and accurately. More than this: in the past, as we’ve made our codes shorter and more abstract, we’ve discovered that unfolding the new codes gives expanded messages, which turn out to correspond to new aspects of reality.

When Newton encoded Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion into his law of universal gravity, explanations of the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and many other tilts and wobbles tumbled out. In 1846, after almost two centuries of triumph upon triumph for Newton’s gravity, small discrepancies were showing up in the orbit of Uranus. Urbain Le Verrier found that he could account for these discrepancies by assuming the existence of a new planet. And lo and behold, when observers turned their telescopes where he suggested they look, there was Neptune!” - Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

“Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages. After examining the appalling type structure of conventional languages, using the elegant tools developed by Dana Scott, it is surprising that so many of us remain passively content with that structure instead of energetically searching for new ones.” - John Backus (Section one of his Turing Award lecture)

“The aim of theory really is, to a great extent, that of systematically organizing past experience in such a way that the next generation, our students and their students and so on, will be able to absorb the essential aspects in as painless a way as possible, and this is the only way in which you can go on cumulatively building up any kind of scientific activity without eventually coming to a dead end.” Michael Atiyah, “How research is carried out” (via Emily Riehl via Sean Seefried).

“When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent and more whole.” - Christoper Alexander

“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” - Francis Bacon

“In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period. Instead of filling a gap by guesswork, genuine science prefers to put up with it; and this, not so much from conscientious scruples about telling ‘lies’, as from the consideration that, however irksome the gap may be, its obliteration by a fake removes the urge to seek after a tenable answer. So efficiently may attention be diverted that the answer is missed even when, by good luck, it comes close at hand. The steadfastness in standing up to a non liquet, nay in appreciating it as a stimulus and a signpost to further quest, is a natural and indispensable disposition in the mind of a scientist.” - Erwin Schrödinger. ‘Nature and the Greeks’ and ‘Science and Humanism’ (Canto Classics)

“[T]he power of a type system arises from its strictures, which can be selectively relaxed, not its affordances, which sacrifice the ability to draw sharp distinctions.” - Bob Harper

Don’t waste the good days
If you’re feeling creative, do the errands tomorrow.
If you’re fit and healthy, take a day to go surfing.
When inspiration strikes, write it down.
The calendar belongs to everyone else. Their schedule isn’t your schedule unless it helps you get where you’re going.
– Seth Godin

“We face no such difficulty if we see that what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD or its equally ill-mannered and discombobulating relatives, but sensitivity. The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.” - Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” - Edward Gibbon

“A theory appears beautiful or elegant […] when it’s simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we’ve already learned for some other reasons.” - Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and Elegance in Physics

“Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested. If the predictions agree with the observations, the theory survives that test, though it can never be proved to be correct.” - Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, chapter 2

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” - Richard Feynman

“The commonplace expressions of arithmetic and algebra have a certain simplicity that most communications to computers lack. In particular, (a) each expression has a nesting subexpression structure, (b) each subexpression denotes something (usually a number, truth value or numerical function), (c) the thing an expression denotes, i.e., its ‘value’, depends only on the values of its subexpressions, not on other properties of them.

It is these properties, and crucially (c), that explains why such expressions are easier to construct and understand. Thus it is (c) that lies behind the evolutionary trend towards ‘bigger righthand sides’ in place of strings of small, explicitly sequenced assignments and jumps. When faced with a new notation that borrows the functional appearance of everyday algebra, it is (c) that gives us a test for whether the notation is genuinely functional or merely masquerading.” - Peter Landin (The Next 700 Programming languages, section 8)

“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.” - Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994), as quoted in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch (2011)

“If you think you understand something, and don’t write down your ideas, you only think you’re thinking. To think clearly, you need to be able to write down your ideas clearly, which requires being able to write well.” - Leslie Lamport

“The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false.” — Alan M. Turing (Computing machinery and intelligence, 1950)

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.” - Douglas Engelbart

“When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When, a few years later, Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. It represents the ‘box of light’ of Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to debate, to understand more. To the very last, doubt. ¶ This permanent doubt, the deep source of science.” - Carlo Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity)

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

- William Stafford (“The Way It Is” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems)

“All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.” - John Cage

“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” - William Blake

“The ultimate reason for teaching kids to write a proof is not that the world is full of proofs. It’s that the world is full of non-proofs, and grown-ups need to know the difference. It’s hard to settle for a non-proof once you’ve really familiarized yourself with the genuine article.” - Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else

“A proof is crystallized thought. It takes that brilliant buoyant moment of ‘getting it’ and fixes it to the page so we can contemplate it at leisure. More importantly, we can share it with other people, in whose mind it springs to life again. A proof is like one of those hardy microbial spores so robust they can survive a trip through outer space on a meteorite and colonize a new planet after impact. Proof makes insight portable.” - Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. There are no syllogisms in Homer. Experience is arranged in terms of events, not categories. Only with writing does narrative structure come to embody sustained rational argument. Aristotle crossed another level, by seeing the study of such argument—not just the use of argument, but its study—as a tool. His logic expresses an ongoing self-consciousness about the words in which they are composed. When Aristotle unfurls premises and conclusions—If it is possible for no man to be a horse, it is also admissible for no horse to be a man; and if it is admissible for no garment to be white, it is also admissible for nothing white to be a garment. For if any white thing must be a garment, then some garment will necessarily be white—he neither requires nor implies any personal experience of horses, garments, or colors. He has departed that realm. Yet he claims through the manipulation of words to create knowledge anyway, and a superior brand of knowledge at that.” -– The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

“You need to explain things you don’t understand in terms of things you do understand.” - Conal Elliott (via Victor Cacciari Miraldo)

“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.” - Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), quoted in Bertrand Russell: On Avoiding Foolish Opinions.

“Don’t verify existing code artefacts. Verifying existing artefacts is more difficult than co-developing a system and its correctness proof. Two factors contribute to this phenomenon. First, when reasoning about an existing system, verification experts have to discover the required properties by spelunking through the code base and documentation. When reasoning about a system being co-developed, the required properties are (relatively) accessible. Second, when coding a system, developers face many choices in how to do things. When they know they have to produce a correctness proof concomitantly, they can make choices that facilitate verification.” - Kathleen Fisher, John Launchbury and Raymond Richards in The HACMS program: using formal methods to eliminate exploitable bugs

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.” - Galileo Galilei

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.” —T. H. Huxley, 1887 (quoted in Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ann Druyan)

“When you write an algorithm, you need to have a proof that it’s correct. An algorithm without a proof is a conjecture; it’s not a theorem. And if you’re proving things, well, that means mathematics.” - Leslie Lamport (interview)

“Those who want really reliable software will discover that they must find means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with, and as a result the programming process will become cheaper.” - Edsger Dijkstra in The Humble Programmer (ACM Turing Lecture 1972 / EWD340)

“Direction is so much more important than speed. Many are going nowhere fast.” - multiple attributions

“Generality from the first, though it may require more thought at the start, will be found in the long run to economise thought and increase logical power.” - Bertrand Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy)

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” - Richard Feynman

“The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.” - Richard Feynman

“Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’, because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.” - Richard Feynman

“See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.” - Richard Feynman

“The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution, not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” - Richard Feynman

“First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.” - Richard Feynman

“If we attempt to formalise our ideas before we have really sorted out the important concepts, the result, though possibly rigorous, is of very little value—indeed, it may well do more harm than good by making it harder to discover the really important concepts. Our motto should be ‘No axiomatization without insight’.” - Christopher Strachey (Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages, 1967)

“In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.” - Georg Cantor