I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.
—Barack Obama
![[Note]](/images/icons/note_a.gif "A short note about this quote.")
I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God's mandate.
—Barack Obama
My politics are informed by a belief that we're all connected. That if there's a child on the South Side of Chicago that can't read, that makes a difference in my life even if it's not my own child. If there's a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that's struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. And if there's an Arab American family that's being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
—Barack Obama
In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hand of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness... The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature.
—Sigmund Freud
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
—Stephen Jay Gould
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—Galileo Galilei
If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? What would I be?
—Buckminster Fuller
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin
I suspect that life is quite common in the universe, and when I say "quite common", it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another. Which is a sad thought.
—Richard Dawkins
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
—J.B.S. Haldane
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
—Mohandas Gandhi
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
—Viktor E. Frankl
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite ' the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
—Carl Sagan
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color and bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
—Richard Dawkins
The universe takes on a whole new meaning when you know that your place in it was not foreordained, that it was not designed for us, indeed, that it was not designed at all. If we are nothing more than star stuff, how special life becomes. How inspiring it is to share in the sublimity of knowledge generated by other human minds, and perhaps to even make a tiny contribution toward that body of knowledge that will be passed down through the ages, part of the cumulative wisdom of a single species on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star on the remote edge of a not-so-unusual galaxy, itself a member of a cluster of galaxies millions of light years from nowhere.
—Michael Shermer
Life is absurd and meaningless and full of nothingness. Possibly this doesn't strike you as helpful and cheerful, but I think it is.
—Alan Alda
It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.
—J. K. Rowling
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
—Bertrand Russell
To go into this question as to what is death, what lies beyond death, whether there is reincarnation or whether there is a resurrection, becomes rather meaningless if you don't know how to live. If the human being knows how to live in this world without conflict then death has quite a different meaning.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
—Stephen Henry Roberts
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms, if only because our species is such an insignificant later-comer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us-- The most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery.
—Stephen Jay Gould
What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.
—R. H. Blyth
God may work in strange ways, his wonders to perform-- but would he really so tax our credulity?
—Stephen Jay Gould
Nihilism is best done by professionals.
—Iggy Pop
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
—Blaise Pascal
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Humanity has in course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
—Sigmund Freud
When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of *Vox populi, vox Dei* (the voice of the people is the voice of God), as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
—Charles Darwin
How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
—Charles Darwin
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
—David Hume
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
—David Hume
When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.
—David Hume
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
—David Hume
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
—Bertrand Russell
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—René Descartes
Only the idea of self remains Floating on a sea of cells; Only heartbeats short of eternity In breath after breath we dwell.
—Mike Garofalo
It (the truth) cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The problem wasn't that it wasn't true. The problem was that no body was interested.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Enlightenment is a natural state of being, in as much as we define enlightenment as ultimate diversity of being rather than a state to be achieved.
—Alan Clements
That innate trust to relax into unfamiliar territory inside and to trust that vulnerability is actually an acceptable presence. That I do not know the answers at times, and I can enter that mystery with a sense of uncertainty, and the quality of feeling my uncertainty is preferable to wisdom itself.
—Alan Clements
...this neurotic momentum into the next as if the next would provide something that the moment couldn't.
—Alan Clements
There is something paradoxical to the fact that what seems most essentially me is actually the product of all of the relationships I have had with what is not me.
—Stephen Batchelor
The source of spirituality does not lie in having the right answers, but in being able to keep alive the most genuine questions.
—Stephen Batchelor
By meditating on death, we can experience the shock of being alive.
—Stephen Batchelor
Life itself can be lived as a question.
—Stephen Batchelor
Just like thirst doesn't prove the existence of water, that longing in our heart doesn't prove something more than this world. But like a guy in a desert looking for water, no one can fault you for searching.
—Howard Abrams
Maybe the moment is older than god and weighs twice as much what's even more odd before the big bang began to begin guess who invented original sin
—Ken Nordine
I think it is bad to write when you don't have a compelling need to say something.
—Robert M. Pirsig
To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged.
—Robert M. Pirsig
To live only for some future goal is shallow.
—Robert M. Pirsig
It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.
—Robert M. Pirsig
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon in a corner of the couch.
—Billy Collins
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.
—Robert M. Pirsig
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe's discovery of footprints on the sand.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle... In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.
—Thomas Huxley
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
—Immanuel Kant
For whereas, so far as nature is concerned, experience supplies the rules and is the source of truth, in respect of the moral laws it is, alas, the mother of illusion!
—Immanuel Kant
What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion.
—Henry David Thoreau
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau
Every single door I've walked through Brings me back, back here again I've got to find my own way.
—Peter Gabriel (Genesis)
And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing of taste and tasting? But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Well the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister.
—Bono (from the group, U2)
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
People are like monkeys Frantically grasping for the moon in the water.
—Ryokan
How painful to see people All wrapped up in themselves.
—Ryokan
The barn's burnt down Now I can see the moon.
—Masahide
All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.
—Issa
Insects on a bough Floating downriver, Still singing.
—Issa
If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.... I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
—Joseph Campbell
We all have a deep longing and a deep fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery. The most effective way it avoids Awakening is to seek it.
—Tony Parsons
We think we are observing nature, but what we are observing is our own mind at work. We are the subject and object of our own methodology.
—Martin J. Verhoeven
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
—Tom Robbins
...as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Cooking, eating, sleeping, every deed of everyday life is nothing else than this Great Matter. Realize this!
—Soen Nakagawa Roshi
One of the conditions of being human is, even if we're surrounded by others, we essentially live our lives alone. Real life takes place inside us.
—Paul Auster
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
—Anna Quindlen
Don't bother to impress people with creative design when you can impress people with creative content.
—Jonathan Hayward
The world ... even software architecture ... can't be relegated to the application of standard patterns. Things are just a tad more interesting than that.
—Howard Abrams
The principle of realpolitik is that politics isn't an expression of your personal purity. Politics is about compromise. People need to understand that politics is very much a matter of the lesser of two evils, or three...
—Tony Kushner
It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
—e.e. cummings
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global... There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror of the ways in which we work and play and socialize.
—Tim Berners-Lee
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.
—Samuel Butler
Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science.
—Albert Einstein
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 f ullness of his being.
—Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
—Aart Van Der Leeuw
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
—Stephen W. Hawking
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
—Giordano Bruno
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—Galileo Galilei
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
—George Bernard Shaw
We have to be very careful that we don't put too many cosmetics on our own thinking. Thoughts don't need lipstick or powder.
—Chogyam Trungpa
Fishes live in rivers and lakes and are not aware of it. Humans live in the realm of Tao and are oblivious to it.
—Zhuang Zi
If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
—Justice William J. Brennan
Distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right... It seems to me such an obvious thing that diversity is not just a foundation of stability; it's an article of faith. It's a fundamental indicator of the way God wanted the world to be.
—Wade Davis
There are thousands upon thousands of students who have practiced meditation and obtained its fruits. Do not doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of the method. If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
—Dogen Zenji
Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when the words won't come at all, and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time.
—Cecilia Bartholomew
Don't be satisfied with [their] stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth... so everyone will understand the passage, we have opened you.
—Jalaluddin Rumi
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—Henry James
People are always talking about looking for the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is a deep experience of life.
—Joseph Campbell
A man's work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
—Albert Camus
Myths are stories, and we find meaning in our lives through the stories we tell. Myths are not true or untrue— they're living or dead.
—Don Lattin
While science revels in explaining how the world works, myth and poetry explain why. Its stories and images ... give a sense of the movements of the soul's experience of the world. This is why myths are lies that tell the truth.
—Phil Cousineau
Self-preservation is a full time occupation.
—Ani Difranco
Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind. That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
—Terence McKenna
Talking about impermanence from a tidy, cerebral perspective is one thing. Embracing it with the heart is another thing altogether.
—Lois at Heart@Work
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