an incomplete list of aphorisms. politics.
Woody Allen
- My one regret in life is that I'm not someone else.
- If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you are playing it safe.
- I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
Aristotle
- All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
- We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Baudelaire
- We forgot two rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The right to contradict oneself, and the right to leave.
- There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.
Cardinal Bellarmine
- To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. (during the trial of Galileo)
Βελτσος
-Επιτρέψτε μου να διαφωνήσω με τον Μητροπολίτη Θεόκλητο: Όταν μια θρησκεία φτάνει στο σημείο να θεωρεί τον εαυτό της ειδωλολατρία, τότε είναι περισσότερο ορθόδοξη. // Allow me to disagree with bishop Theoklitos: When a religion reaches the point where it considers itself an idolatry, then it is more orthodox.
H. Berlioz
- Time is a great teacher but it kills all its students.
J.L. Borges
- Thinking, analyzing, inventing are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
Ashleigh Brilliant
- Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.
- My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
Frank Burns
- Marriage is probably the main cause of divorce.
Lord Byron
- Of religion I know nothing - at least, in its favor.
Albert Camus
- There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
- Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
- The truth, as the light, makes blind.
- Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
- And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
- What morbid misery there is in the condition of a man who worksand in a civilization based on men who work.
- The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept
the unintelligibility of the world --and to pay attention to man.
Noam Chomsky
- The Internet is an elite organization. Most of the people in the world have never even made a phone call.
Clausewitz
- War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.
E. Delacroix
- What makes men of genius is not new ideas; it is that dominant idea that what has been said has not yet been said enough.
Denis Diderot
- From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
- The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
Epicurus
- Will the wise man do things forbidden by law, knowing that he will not be caught? The simple answer is not easy to find.
- It is impossible for the one who instills fear to remain free from fear.
- Everyone departs from life as if he had only just been born.
Susan Ertz
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
G. Flaubert
- Masterpieces are like the larger of mammals. They have a peaceful look.
- A man judging another is a sight that would make me burst with laughter if it did not fill me with pity.
Michel Foucault
- I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation... This transformation of one's self by one's knowledge, one's practice is something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?
- Everyone has their own way of changing, or, what amounts to the same thing, of perceiving that everything changes... My way of no longer being the same is, by definition, the most unique part of what I am.
Mohandas Gandhi
- I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
- I think it would be a good idea. (when asked what he thought about the Western civilization)
- The principle of an eye for an eye with some day make the whole world blind.
- If you think the world is all wrong, remember that it contains people like you.
- What you do is of little significance. But it is very important that you do it.
- Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Andre Gide
- The only beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
Richard Harkness
- What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do
the unnecessary.
Heraclitus
- No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
Edward Herman
- It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.
Franz Kafka
- A lake doesn't flow into anything, you know.
- From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
- The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.
Immanuel Kant
- He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray.
John Lennon
- Life is what happens when you're making other plans.
Georg Lichtenberg
- One's first step to wisdom is to question everything; and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
- To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
- I have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understand the wise is wise already.
Thomas Mann
- War is just a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Herbert Marcuse
- The union of growing productivity and growing destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender of thought, hope, and fear to the decisions of the powers that be; the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitute the most impartial indictment... Society's sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth is itself irrational.
- One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.
Karl Marx
- The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
- Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
H. L. Mencken
- Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
- Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
James Michener
Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
Ludwig von Mises
- Progress cannot be organized.
- Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.
Montesquieu
- Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.
Friedrich Nietzsche
- That everyone may learn to read, in the long run corrupts not only writing but also thinking.
- In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
- When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.
- Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.
- There are no facts, only interpretations.
- Corruption: The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
- The most valuable of intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt.
- Love is like racing across the frozen tundra on a snowmobile which flips over, trapping you underneath. At night, the ice-weasels come.
- The very word Christian is a misunderstanding --at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
- One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
George Orwell
- As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
Salman Rushdie
- Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.
Bertrand Russell
- The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.
- In view of the stupidity of the majority of the people, a widely held opinion is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
- A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Jean-Paul Sartre
- Existence precedes and rules essence.
- It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
- A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
- Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
- Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
- Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.
- There is no human nature... Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
- When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
Schopenhauer
- Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
Bernard Shaw
- Life does not cease to be funny when people die; any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
- There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
- Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
Socrates
- By all means get married, If you get a good wife you'll become happy; If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
Mark Twain
- If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Gore Vidal
- It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Voltaire
- It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
- Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
- Doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing.
Oscar Wilde
- I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.
- Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
- If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
- Success is a science; if you have the conditions you get the result.
- Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
- Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.
- It is fatal to live too long.
- I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again...
Unknown
- Killing for peace is like fucking for virginity.
- Democracy is where you can say what you think even if you don't think.
- The King said to the Priest: You keep them stupid, I'll keep them poor !
- The thinking man looks at the world and sees a comedy. The feeling man looks at the world and sees a tragedy.
- I know that I am God; When I pray I feel like I'm talking to myself.
an incomplete list of aphorisms. physics.
Isaac Asimov
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."
Henri Bergson
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
William Blake
To generalize is to be an idiot.
Niels Bohr
- Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
- The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Albert Einstein
- The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
- Quantum Mechanics: Real Black Magic Calculus
- [My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.
- It's not that I am so smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer.
- As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
- One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
R. Feynman
- The biggest problem with being a student is that you're always too busy getting an education to learn anything.
- When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology, it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all.
- There is plenty of room at the bottom.
- We decided that "trivial' means "proved". So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial".
I. Gelfand
- If you understand something, you understand that it is obvious.
Piet Hein
- Problems worthy of attack, prove their worth by fighting back.
H. L. Mencken
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Leon Lederman
- Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
- If the basic idea is too complicated to fit on a T-shirt, it's probably wrong.
Abraham Maslow
- When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.
Pablo Picasso
- Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.
Ernest Renan
- The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Ernest Rutherford
- All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ian Stewart
- It's not so much a universe in which - as Einstein memorably refused to believe - God plays dice: it seems more a universe in which dice play God.
James Watson
- One could not be a successful scientist without realising that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow minded and dull but also just stupid.
Unknown
- I have seen the truth, and it makes no sense !
- Life is complex; it was both real and imaginary parts.
- In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
- If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called re-search!
- Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way. (This one Sartre would like!)