You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—Ray Bradbury
The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
—Mortimer Adler
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
—Bertrand Russell
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
—Alfred Korzybski
However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.
—Robertson Davies
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
—Gertrude Stein
Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
—Fred Hoyle
No one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.
—Rachel Cohn in Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.
—Charlie Munger
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
—Charles Darwin
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.
—Louisa May Alcott
Imagination is more important than knowledge…
—Albert Einstein