Ren > Ren's Quotes

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.”
― Karl Popper

“Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.”
― Omar N. Bradley

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge. —Daniel J. Boorstin”
― Peter Attia MD, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.”
― Paracelsus

“Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.”
― Paracelsus

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”
― Niels Bohr

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”
― Thomas Szasz

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
― Saint Augustine

“So I took up those poems with which they seemed to have taken most trouble and asked them what they meant, in order that I might at the same time learn something from them. I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could. I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”
― Plato, Apology

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”
― Issac Asimov

“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”
― Saul Bellow

“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”
― John Gregory Dunne

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“That which we give makes us richer, that which is hoarded is lost”
― Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther's Skin

“Sometimes the heart endures all grief because it seeks joy at the start.”
― Lyn Coffin, The Knight in the Panther's Skin

“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”
― Frank Ocean

“The universe, then, is God, of whom the popular gods are manifestations; while legends and myths are allegorical. The soul of man is thus an emanation from the godhead, into whom it will eventually be re-absorbed. The divine ruling principle makes all things work together for good, but for the good of the whole. The highest good of man is consciously to work with God for the common good, and this is the sense in which the Stoic tried to live in accord with nature. In the individual it is virtue alone which enables him to do this; as Providence rules the universe, so virtue in the soul must rule man.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations