How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
When you realize there is something you don’t understand, then you’re generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us–but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.
If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure–and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day… Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.
It’s not him who’s disturbed. But he likes to disturb others–to shake them out of their rut.
But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn’t admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant’s trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit’s fur!)
If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called ‘faith’, but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience–and the truth– higher than life.
Man is the measure of all things’, said the Sophist Protagora (c. 485-410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person’s needs.
When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because “moon atoms” penetrate my eye.
Wir werden alt und grau. Wir werden eines Tages verschlissen sein und aus der Welt verschwinden. Mit unseren Träumen ist das anders. Sie können in anderen Menschen weiterleben, wenn es uns schon längst, längst nicht mehr gibt.
But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it’s hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.
But what is a person, George? How much is a person worth? Are we nothing but dust that is whipped up and spread to the winds?
Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.
Look at the world, Georg, look at the world before you’ve filled yourself with too much physics and chemistry.
But sorrow can also be contagious. Fear is different. It isn’t as communicable as laughter or sadness, and a good thing too. Fear is almost entirely a lonely thing.
Although I’ve always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.
I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I’ve already experienced. I just want so desperately to hang on what I have.
Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other – and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.
Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal – and that no man can escape his destiny.
But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
… perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead…
I didn’t feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.
All a man can see while looking at the sky are cosmic fossils of thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can predict, is the past.
It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand, we can rely on what our reason tells us because that is the same for everyone
If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can’t ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.
Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold allkinds of wares. Finally he said, “What a lot of things I don’t need!
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
The one who says he doesn’t understand anything about art, doesn’t know himself.
No day is alike – I do many other things, and I’m very active in the environmental movement.