Selected quotes about life, the human mind, philosophy, religion, and other topics

Quotes about life, people and the human mind

Voltaire (1694-1778)

• Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbours.
• Prejudice is an opinion without judgment.
• Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
• No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

Horace Mann (1796-1859)

• Until you have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.

Francis Galton (1822-1911)

• Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

• Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
• You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

• There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
• In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire . . . as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself . . . . I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects.
• To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
• I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
• A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
• There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

• What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?
• Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
• When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.
• You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.
• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
• If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.
• Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
• The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.

J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964)

• Theories have four stages of acceptance. i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
• Economic and social behaviours are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.
• One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.

Quotes about philosophy & religion

Buddha

• The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.

Seneca the Younger (4 BCE–65 CE)

• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Voltaire (1694-1778)

• To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.
• It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
• There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

• From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
• Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian... Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.
• To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

• Faith and knowledge are related as the scales of a balance; when one goes up the other goes down.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

• I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
• In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
• To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
• 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.
• Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
• 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.
• What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
• I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-1971)

• When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours as well.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

• Life has no meaning a priori. It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)

• To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
• The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
• If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports?
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
• Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window.

Anonymous

• Gods don't kill people. People with gods kill people.