Noah > Noah's Quotes

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...
This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation: Library Edition

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
― John Keats

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
― Carl Sagan

“That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
― Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation – Intimate Reflections on Faith, Seminary, Ministry, and Writing

“To be wise is to be eternally curious.”
― Frederick Buechner

“The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”
― Karl R. Popper

“When ye come where I have stepped
Ye will wonder why ye wept;”
― Edwin Arnold, After Death in Arabia

“Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, Meditation XVII - Meditation 17

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe... And then they hold by a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe... The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is... Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other... We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem... Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering... There is always more than one solution... An autonomously full universe... Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self... Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size... There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“Knowledge is like the sheerest transparency, precisely the most perfect and purest, like the purest water, which has no taste at all. The magistrate is not defiled because he knows more about the plots than the criminal. No, knowledge does not defile a man; it is mistrust which defiles a man's knowledge just as love purifies it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“CASSIUS
Did Cicero say any thing?

CASCA
Ay, he spoke Greek.

CASSIUS
To what effect?

CASCA
Nay, an I tell you that, Ill ne'er look you i' the
face again: but those that understood him smiled at
one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own
part, it was Greek to me...”
― Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Man breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide,” I called to Mona.

“What?”

“Science.”

“Oh.”

“One of the secrets of life man was a long time understanding: Animals breathe in what animals breathe out, and vice versa.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You know now.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle

“...in case you run across Dr. Schweitzer in your travels, you might tell him that he is not my hero.” He lit a big cigar.

When the cigar was going good and hot he pointed its red end at me. “You can tell him he isn’t my hero,” he said, “but you can also tell him that, thanks to him, Jesus Christ is.”

“I think he’ll be glad to hear it.”

“I don’t give a damn if he is or not. This is something between Jesus and me.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“The inner workings of batteries and rocket engines are well understood, governed by known physics recorded in careful textbooks. AIs, on the other hand, are grown, and no one understands their inner workings. There are fewer equations to constrain one's thinking... and so, many opportunities to think about high-minded ideals like truth-seeking instead.

If you know the history of science, this kind of talk is recognizable as the stage of folk theory, the stage where lots of different people are inventing lots of different theories that appeal to them personally, the way people talk before science has really gotten started on something. They're the words of an alchemist who's decided that some complicated philosophical scheme will let them transmute lead into gold.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

“But so far as the intelligence is tied to its technical expression, so far as the intellectual tends to become a technician, their sphere of action–which seemed to be extended by all the technical aids–in reality becomes narrower and narrower. Because the intelligence cannot be freed from its instrument, it remains limited today to the sphere in which this instrument can act, can be utilized.”
― Jacques Ellul, Presence of the Kingdom