Thomas Law > Thomas's Quotes

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#1

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: books, reading, we-are-what-we-eat, we-are-what-we-read, you-are-what-you-eat, you-are-what-you-read

6189 likes

#2

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented…. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

71 likes

#3

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

tags: death, humor, life

6752 likes

#4

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

tags: greatness

15502 likes

#5

“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.”
― Gore Vidal

95 likes

#6

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.

—"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64”
― Albert Einstein

tags: 1955, curiosity, mystery

6843 likes

#7

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

tags: ataraxy, be-yourself, confidence, fitting-in, individuality, misattributed-dr-seuss, those-who-matter

130755 likes

#9

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

tags: lies, lying, memory, truth

92742 likes

#10

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

tags: how, life, purpose, questioning, questions, why

5949 likes

#11

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

tags: anarchy, coercion, collectivism, control, equality, free-market, freedom, individual-freedom, individualism, laissez-faire, libertarian, liberty, natural-law, non-aggression-principle, peace, politics, slavery, socialism, statism, taxation, universal-ethics, voluntaryism

328 likes

#12

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

101844 likes

#13

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

tags: carpe-diem, education, inspirational, learning

78046 likes

#14

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation

71901 likes

#15

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

183 likes

#16

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

68383 likes

#17

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
― Galileo Galilei

tags: dissent, independent-thought, reasoning, science, scientific-method, truth-telling

382 likes

#18

“The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils

tags: misattributed-to-einstein

21530 likes

#19

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein

tags: science

8431 likes

#20

“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

177 likes

#21

“The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

59 likes

#22

“Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow, 'Get out, you don't belong here?' Does the tree say to the hungry man, 'This fruit is not for you?' Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?”
― Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

tags: love, religion

35 likes

#23

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: books, reading, writing

1744 likes

#24

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
― Laurence J. Peter

tags: misattributed-einstein

8409 likes

#25

“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

200 likes

#26

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

tags: einstein, gaiman, god, humor

2656 likes

#27

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: einstein, philosophy, science

1017 likes

#28

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: destiny, einstein, inspirational

395 likes

#29

“How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: einstein

176 likes

#30

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

tags: albert-einstein, aristotle, charles-darwin, crick, darwin, einstein, francis-crick, intellect, isaac-newton, james-d-watson, james-watson, knowledge, max-planck, newton, planck, polymath, science, understanding, watson

189 likes

#31

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: attributed-no-source, human-nature, humor, infinity, philosophy, science, stupidity, universe

149257 likes

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