Interesting Quotes
Contents
Quotes on Human Nature
| "All of the world is just four conditions, and each of those conditions has a response: The first condition is blessing, and the response is gratitude; the second condition is tribulation, and the response is patience; the third condition is obedience, and the response is humility; the fourth condition is sinfulness, and the response is repentance." | Ibn Ataillah |
| “Man’s nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint.” | al-Ghazali |
| “Smiling in the face of your brother is charity, and pouring out from your bucket into your brother’s bucket is charity." | Hadith |
| “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life." | Rabindranath Tagore |
| “We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race." | Kofi Annan |
| "Hat man sein 'warum' des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem 'wie.'"[He who has a 'why' for his life can deal with almost any 'how.'"] | Friedrich Nietzche |
| "To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature." | Adam Smith |
| "If we're gonna have the law of the jungle, then we can all be beasts, and not only some of us." | Mouin Rabbani |
| "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." | Henry David Thoreau |
| "All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal." | John Steinbeck |
| "He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress." | Anwar Sadat |
| "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." | Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences." | D.H. Lawrence |
| "τί οὖν δεῖ λέγειν αὐτὸν ἐφ᾽ἑκάστου τῶν τραχέων; ὅτι ‘ἕνεκα τούτου ἐγυμναζόμην, ἐπὶ τοῦτο ἤσκουν." [What, then, must one say upon each of the harsh (things)? That on account of this I was exercising. For this I was training.] | Epictetus |
| "Martin Buber said, in effect, 'People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. Most of our troubles come from the fact that we love things, and use people.' This is being blind to the first fact of a satisfying life." | John Heuss |
| "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." | James Baldwin |
| "One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today." | Dale Carnegie |
| "Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward." | Oscar Wilde |
| "We are capable of using our compassion, intelligence, technology, and wealth to make meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet and to enhance our understanding of the universe. This understanding will carry us to the stars. But if we capitulate to superstition, greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world back into the dark ages." | Carl Sagan |
| "Der größte Feind eines guten Plans ist der Traum vom perfekten Plan." [The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.] | Carl von Clausewitz |
| "Then a terrible commotion was set up within me. I analyzed myself to the last thread, compared myself with others, recalled the slightest glances, smiles, words of the people to whom I had tried to open myself out, put the worst construction on everything, laughed vindictively at my own pretensions to 'be' like everyone else--and suddenly, in the midst of my laughter, collapsed utterly into gloom, sank into absurd dejection, and then began again as before--went round and round, in fact like a squirrel on its wheel. Whole days were spent in this harassing, fruitless exercise. Well now, tell me, if you please, to whom and for what is such a man of use? Why did this happen to me? What was the reason of this trivial fretting at myself? Who knows? Who can tell?" [Тогда-то поднималась внутри меня страшная тревога. Я разбирал самого себя до последней ниточки, сравнивал себя с другими, припоминал малейшие взгляды, улыбки, слова людей, перед которыми хотел было развернуться, толковал все в дурную сторону, язвительно смеялся над своим притязанием "быть, как все", -- и вдруг, среди смеха, печально опускался весь, впадал в нелепое уныние, а там опять принимался за прежнее, -- словом, вертелся, как белка" в колесе. Целые дни проходили в этой мучительной, бесплодной работе. Ну, теперь, скажите на милость, скажите сами, кому и на что такой человек нужен? Отчего это со мной происходило, какая причина этой кропотливой возни с самим собою- кто знает? кто скажет?] | Ivan Turgenev |
| "You did the best you could with what you knew at the time. Don't let new wisdom lead you to condemn yourself over old struggles. Forgive yourself and move forward." | Morgan Richard Olivier |
| "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail." | Abraham Maslow |
| "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 in 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 |
Quotes on Knowledge and Truth
| "I can argue with ten knowledgeable people, but I will definitely lose to an ignorant person—because the ignorant person never understands the path of knowledge." | al-Shafi'i |
| "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." | George Carlin |
| "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, Jr. |
| "It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see? You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection." | Walter Lippmann |
| "When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with." | Anaïs Nin |
| "There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." | Anaïs Nin |
| "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." | Aldous Huxley |
| "I mostri esistono, ma sono troppo pochi per essere davvero pericolosi. Sono più pericolosi gli uomini comuni, i funzionari pronti a credere e obbedire senza discutere [...] Occorre dunque essere diffidenti con chi cerca di convincerci con strumenti diversi dalla ragione, ossia i capi carismatici: dobbiamo essere cauti nel delegare ad altri il nostro giudizio e la nostra volontà." [Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to obey without question [...] We must, therefore, be wary of those who try to convince us with tools other than reason, such as charismatic leaders: We must be cautious in delegating our judgment and our will.] | Primo Michele Levi |
| "We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." | George Orwell |
| "По логике-то, кажется у него и так выходит. Но до того человек пристрастен к системе и к отвлеченному выводу, что готов умышленно исказить правду, готов видом не видать и слыхом не слыхать, только чтоб оправдать свою логику." [Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it.] | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| "Trying to discredit an analysis simply by giving it an unpopular label is not intellectually responsible. All analyses are open to challenge, of course, but an intelligent challenge worthy of equal consideration must be in the form of counterargument." | Unknown |
| "If you don't read the papers, you're uninformed. If you do read the papers, you're misinformed." | Mark Twain |
| "Лгущий самому себе и собственную ложь свою слушающий до того доходит, что уж никакой правды ни в себе, ни кругом не различает, а стало быть входит в неуважение и к себе и к другим. Не уважая же никого, перестает любить, а чтобы, не имея любви, занять себя и развлечь, предается страстям и грубым сладостям, и доходит совсем до скотства в пороках своих, а всё от беспрерывной лжи и людям и себе самому." [Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.] | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| "There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'" | G.K. Chesterton |
| "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." | Noam Chomsky |
| "The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who haven't got it." | George Bernard Shaw |
| “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” | Flannery O’Connor |
| “Επιλέξτε να μην πληγωθείτε – και δεν θα νιώσετε πληγωμένοι. Μην αισθάνεστε ότι σας έχουν βλάψει — και δεν θα το έχετε πάθει." [Choose not to be harmed, and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't been.] | Marcus Aurelius |
| "Plura sunt quae nos terrent quam quae premunt; et saepius opinione quam re laboramus." [Our alarms are much more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer much oftener in imagination than in reality.]" | Seneca |
| "The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." | Alvin Toffler |
| "ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ" [And an unexamined life is not worth living for man.] | Socrates |
| "τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι· κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι· ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι." [I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.] | Socrates |
| "Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur? Commemoratio autem antiquitatis exemplorumque prolatio summa cum delectatione et auctoritatem orationi affert et fidem." [To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? Moreover, the mention of antiquity and the citation of examples give the speech authority and credibility as well as affording the highest pleasure to the audience.] | Cicero |
| "The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." | Hannah Arendt |
| "Ερέτην χρήναι πρώτα γενέσθαι πριν πηδαλίοις επιχειρείν." [You should have served as an oarsman before you try to take the helm.] | Aristophanes |
| "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion [...] Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them [...] he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form." | John Stuart Mill |
| "Ceux qui peuvent vous faire croire à des absurdités peuvent vous faire commettre des atrocités." [Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.] | M. de Voltaire |
| "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." | George Orwell |
| "Таким образом я прямо сказал, что принимание чего-либо на веру, исключение критического претворения и развития есть тяжкий грех, а для того, чтобы претворять и развивать, «простого истолкования», очевидно, недостаточно." [Thus I definitely said that to accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin; and in order to apply and develop, “simple interpretation” is obviously not enough.] | Vladimir Lenin |
| “You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe before that." | Jordan Peterson |
| "When you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that's fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive." | Jonathan Haidt |
| "While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you." | Jonathan Haidt |
| "It's important, so that we don't become what we're fighting: doggedly certain, closed-minded, epistemologically arrogant, dogmatic, and religious. Being genuinely open to revise or to change your beliefs is an attitudinal disposition." | Peter Boghossian |
| "Man kan jo bedrages paa mange Maader; man kan bedrages ved at troe det Usande, men man bedrages dog vel ogsaa ved ikke at troe det Sande." [Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true.] | Soren Kierkegaard |
| "If you want to send your kids to a place where they're protected from reality, then you send them to a daycare center." | Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
| "La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu’il faut mettre la première." [The last thing you figure out in writing a book is what to put first.] | Blaise Pascal |
| “學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。" [To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.] | Confucius |
Quotes on Reading, Writing, and Teaching
| "The quality of a paper can be measured by how much has gone in the trash." | Unnamed Professor |
| "In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it." | David Foster Wallace |
| "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words." | Robert Frost |
| "You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well." | Jennifer Egan |
| "Don't just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better." | Epictetus |
| "A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel; rather, it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. If one did it deftly, one could, in a one-paragraph opening, grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument." | David Foster Wallace |
| "In my experience with students, talented students of writing, the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. I norder to write effectively, you don't pretend it's a letter to some individual you know, but you never forget that what you're engaged in is a communication to another human being. The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind [...t]he average person you're writing for is an acute, sensitive, attentive, sophisticated reader who will appreciate adroitness, precision, economy, and clarity." | David Foster Wallace |
| "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' 'In 1984,' Huxley added, 'people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.' In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us." | Neil Postman |
| "It wasn't until I claimed the sentence as my area of desire, interest, and expertise—until I wanted to be a writer writing better—that I had to look underneath my initial readings [...] I started asking, how—how did the writer get me to feel, how did the writer say something so that it remains in my memory when many other things too easily fall out, how did the writer communicate his/her intentions about genre, about irony?" | Wendy Bishop |
| "When we read like writers we understand and participate in the writing. We see the choices the writer has made, and we see how the writier has coped with the consequences of those choices [...] We 'see' what the writer is doing because we read as writers; we see because we have written ourselves and know the territory, know the feel of it, know some of the moves ourselves." | Charles Moran |
| "Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts." | Anne Lamott |
| "I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones. This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say." | Brenda Ueland |
| "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive." | James Baldwin |
| "In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act [...] but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space." | Joan Didion |
| "Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money." | Virginia Woolf |
| "I write to discover what I know." | Flannery O'Connor |
| "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." | John Steinbeck |
| "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." | Charles W. Eliot |
| "When people write, they draw on the genres they know, their own context of genres, to help construct their rhetorical action. If they encounter a situation new to them, it is the genres they have acquired in the past that they can use to shape their new action. Every genre they acquire, then, expands their genre repertoire and simultaneously shapes how they might view new situations." | Amy Devitt |
| "It is through genre that we recognize the kinds of messages a document may contain, the kind of situation it is part of and it might migrate to, the kinds of roles and relations of writers and readers, and the kinds of actions realized in the document." | Charles Bazerman |