Dominik > Dominik's Quotes

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Albert Einstein

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”
― Benoît Mandelbrot

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
― Albert Einstein

“Beliefs do not change facts. Facts, if one is rational, should change beliefs.”
― Ricky Gervais

“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.”
― Robert Brault

“Often, what seems like an impossible climb is just a staircase without the steps drawn in.”
― Robert Brault

“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“[...] wir [müssen] begreifen, dass es in unserem Leben letztlich auf das Sein ankommt und nicht darauf zu erhoffen, dass das Werden ein besseres Sein ist, als die Gegenwart.”
― Richard David Precht

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
― Anatole France

“Reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions.”
― Steven Pinker

“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Non numerantur, sed ponderantur”
― Paul Erdös

“One insight is worth a thousand analyses.”
― Charles Sooter

“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

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Die ganze Dunkelheit der Welt reicht nicht aus, das Licht einer einzigen Kerze zu löschen.”
― Roman Herzog

“Yesterday is but a dream,
Tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.”
― Kālidāsa, The Complete Works of Kalidasa, Vol. 1: Poems

“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not the possession of but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“It always seems impossible until it's done.”
― Nelson Mandela