Sunday, January 04, 2009

Points to ponder

There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
- Stephen W. Hawking

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
- Stephen W. Hawking


The visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
- Physicist Heinz Pagels


There is no reality in the absence of observation.
- The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics


No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.
- J.S. Bell


If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
- Niels Bohr


Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
- Claude Bernard

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
- Lewis Carroll


Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
- Niels Bohr


To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
- Copernicus


Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein

The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!
- Lord Byron


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


Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen W. Hawking

It gives me a deep comforting sense that ‘things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.’
- Helen Keller
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
- William James


We feel and know that we are eternal.
- Edmund Spenser


As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.
- Carl Jung


Time is not a line, but a series of now points.
- Taisen Deshimaru


The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
- Chang-Tzu

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become-to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.
- The Upanishads

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the law of the universe will be simpler.
- H.D. Thoreau

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
- Carl Gustav Jung

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
- Winston Churchill

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity...and I'm not sure about the universe.
- Albert Einstein

Know thyself.
- Socrates

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
- James Joyce, Ulysses

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
- Albert Einstein

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
- John Maynard Keynes

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
- Democritus of Abdera

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- George Bernard Shaw

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson