The Great Quotes thread

[Bill Ryan]

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

George Carlin

[JackMcThorn]

The man who views the world at 5o the same as he did at 2o has wasted 3o years of his life. - Muhammad Ali

[Eva2]

Religions are true for ordinary people, false for intellectuals, and useful for those in power.

Seneca

[grapevine]

[Raskolnikov]

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Tintin]

C.S. Lewis:

[Raskolnikov]

"When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men."

Manly P. Hall

[Ewan]

I love the simplicity of this quote.

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”

Socrates

[Bill Ryan]

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.

Thomas Huxley (Fellow of the British Royal Society and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science), 1868

[Raskolnikov]

In contrast to your quote's simplicity Ewan, here's something from the opposite spectrum. This man was written off as a romantic, a dreamer; he was the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Yet he knew exactly what he was looking for, exactly what had been hidden in the dense jungles of the Amazon for millennia. Question is: Did he find it?

“I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts. There are rumors, too, of a strange source of light in the buildings, a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it. The central place I call “Z” — our main objective — is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of “Z.” Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.”

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett in a letter to his son Brian.

[Michi]

Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities.

- Henry Thomas Buckle

(that quote is most commonly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, however, the attribution to Eleanor Roosevelt is unverified. The earliest close version that researchers have traced appears in a 1901 autobiography by Charles Stewart, who attributed it to historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862). Buckle distinguished people who discussed persons, things, and ideas.)

[Raskolnikov]

"The deepest form of slavery is the hunger for being understood by others."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Eva2]

There is no greater scripture than nature, for nature is life itself. - Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan

Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the others enter into no rivalry with him - Aristotle

[Raskolnikov]

“Magic is a way of living. If one has done one’s best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place."

Carl Jung

[Bill Ryan]

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, 1955
(stated in a jointly written manifesto about the consequences of nuclear war)

[Raskolnikov]

"He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived."

Chinese proverb

[grapevine]

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."

- Ernest Hemingway in his 1935 essay "Notes on the Next War"