Facts, like living things, have a value in and of themselves and demand respect. Yet some people use them as means to an end, and dismiss them as soon as they are done using them.
True ideas seem to suffer from repetition, while stupid ones tend to flourish.
A thousand truths can be assembled in such a way as to create a colossal lie.
As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.
You may never live long enough to discover who you are, but by the time you reach middle age you will hopefully realize who you are not.
Technology has not made humanity any wiser, it has only made us more dangerous.
What is wisdom? It is the result of multiple paradigms brought to their intellectual furthest reaches and balanced and merged together. The fundamentalist, the person who only sees life through a single lens, can never hope for wisdom.
Sometimes you come to realize you understand something but you can’t explain it to anyone, not even yourself. This is perhaps the most sacred kind of understanding.
There is no greater thing than to be oneself, and it is never too late to do so.
Death is the night sky, the background against which the fleeting fireworks of life are displayed, an empty stage upon which the drama of life is played.
Science is the process of obscuring the marvelous with explanations.
A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.
We have created a world we don’t like, don’t understand and don’t trust, and we are too frightened to try to change it.
A politician is someone who knows everything about running a campaign and nothing about running a country.
Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.
Art helps you connect to the world, not escape from it. That is the difference between art and entertainment.
Once art served to educate and edify, now it distracts and amuses.
Intelligence is overrated. Two dogs who sniff each others’ butts learn more about each other in a moment than many humans understand about those they’ve known for a lifetime.
Intelligence resides between us as much as it resides in us. And it resides within the subconscious much more than it does the conscious. We’re just conscious-biased: our conscious mind wants us to think it’s the be all and end all.
The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.
Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I’d be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube.
I write pre-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, I’m not interested in a future where everything is blown to hell, I’d rather write something that helps to prevent it from happening.
Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women’s issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors.
Never in mankind’s history have we so fundamentally changed our means of existence with so little thought.
Sooner or later you realize there are no answers, no answers except the ones you believe. Sooner or later faith is the only answer left.
Life is like a box of chocolates: You get through what little actual good stuff there is right away, then you constantly fool yourself into believing there’s still something good in whatever’s left.
Good enough may be an acceptable end, but it should never be an acceptable goal.
To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still.
I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for the past, but after all I suppose that is the only thing one can be nostalgic about.
There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past.
You’ve got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You’re only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.
If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.
Contrary to popular belief, you can make people think, but they will hate you for it.
Ignorance is a horrible thing. But arrogance, the belief that knowing a little more than the ignorant makes you wise, is more horrible still.
A truth told once is no match for a lie oft repeated.
I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.
The definition of stupid is the inabilitly to see another side to an argument other than one’s own.
Heaven is fleeting, but Hell is an eternity. Hell becomes the more so the longer one lives it.
It really was amazing, thought Mindy, the way modern electronics made it so easy to ignore those people who were physically so close.
People perceive the divine according to their own biases. That doesn’t make the experience any less real.
The intellect seeks to throw its own interpretation of the real over reality, and in so doing carves the world up into artificial little cubes.
Simplistic ideas are the weapons with which the thoughtful are clubbed.
I don’t want us to be the species that ruins it for the rest. What we do not consume we poison. Sometimes we do both. Perhaps that is how we shall end, by consuming the poisons we have created.
Here is the paradox of it: the more of an individual you become the more you realize we are interrelated, that success of one requires the success of all.
Each man is an island unto himself. But though a sea of difference may divide us, an entire world of commonality lies beneath.
There is a third choice besides being busy and killing time, something profound.
If God rewards the faithful with earthly rewards, then what leverage does the devil have?
It is wisdom to know who you are, but not to the point of excluding who you might become.
Perhaps the media may not always be telling what to think, but it is always telling you what to think about.
Safety and constancy were illusions granted only to those afraid enough not to peer beyond the walls.
Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.
We look for things or people that are incorruptible. There is nothing incorruptible, merely uncorrupted. We neglect the role we play. We value innocence, but only the kind we cannot alter. We throw mud at purity and mock it for its stain.
Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn’t say anything bad about it.
We have to believe in free will, we have no other choice.
Security is an illusion, but it is a pleasant one.
No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .