Neuromythography

The Architecture of the Soul

Quotes

This page is a complete listing of the quotes that I have sprinkled across the other pages of this web site. There are some famous ones, but like the jackdaw I pick up little baubles here and there and weave them into my nest. I hope that you enjoy browsing the entire collection.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

— Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

— Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

— Albert Einstein

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

— Albert Einstein

The woman that follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

— Albert Einstein

The more I learn, the more I learn that I have more to learn.

— Albert Einstein

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

— Aldous Huxley

The simple step of a courageous individual is to not take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.

— Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

The map is not the territory.

— Alfred Korzybski

Whatever you say a thing is, it isn’t.

— Alfred Korzybski

THE METHOD OF ECONOMICS
(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry.
(2) Keep to them till you have done.
(3) Translate into English.
(4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life
(5) Burn the mathematics.
(6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.

— Alfred Marshall

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

— Anais Nin

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

— Anais Nin

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

— Antoine Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?’ she whispered. ‘No, we never had to.”

Probability has turned modern science into a truth casino.

— Bart Kosko

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Everything that is a proposition of logic has got to be in some sense or the other like a tautology.

— Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

— Bertrand Russell

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

— Bible, Genesis 2:20

I like the way they let their madness show through, always a good thing in an artist.

— Brian May, Queen lead guitarist, Quoted regarding British rock band Muse

If you find no one to support you on the spiritual path, walk alone.

— Buddha

People with opinions just go around bothering each other.

— Buddha

Our psyche, which is primarily responsible for all the historical changes wrought by the hand of man on the face of this planet, remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding complexity - a feature it shares with all Nature’s secrets.

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?

— Carl Jung

It means a lot to me to see how our points of view are getting closer, for if you feel isolated from your contemporaries when grappling with the unconscious, it is also the same with me, in fact more so, since I am actually standing in the isolated area, striving somehow to bridge the gap that separates me from the others. After all, it is no pleasure for me always to be regarded as esoteric. Oddly enough, the problem is still the same 2,000-year-old one: How does one get from Three to Four?

— Carl Jung, Carl Jung Letter to Wolfgang Pauli

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

— Charles Darwin

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.

— Charles Darwin

I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.

— David, Psalms 78 : 2

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

— Emily Dickinson

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

— Eric Hoffer

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

— Eric Hoffer

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

— Eric Hoffer

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

— Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

— Eric Hoffer

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

— Eric Hoffer

Every word ever uttered is a metaphor. The word is not the thing: the word presents, translates the thing. It gives one kind of experience as another kind of experience, direct awareness as speech.

— Eric McLuhan

No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been “carpentered” to do so and would thus be open to suspicion.

— Francis Crick

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

— Freeman Dyson

That this subject [imaginary numbers] has hitherto been surrounded by mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.

— Friedrich Gauss

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences—and number theory is the queen of mathematics.

— Friedrich Gauss

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe

— Galileo

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

— George Bernard Shaw

All models are wrong but some are useful.

— George Box

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology.

— George Lucas

Content without method leads to fantasy, method without content to empty sophistry.

— Goethe

You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.

— Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke

A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men.

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

— Henri Poincaré

The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.

— Henri Poincaré

I heartily beg that what I have here done may be read with candour; and that the defects in a subject so difficult be not so much reprehended as kindly supplied, and investigated by new endeavours of my readers.

— Isaac Newton, Preface to The Principia

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants

— Isaac Newton

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.

— James Hillman

I have frequently fatigued myself by running after and stoning a cock, a cow, a dog, or any animal I saw tormenting another, only because it was conscious of possessing superior strength.

The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
“The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:
Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

— Jesus, Matthew 13 : 10-17

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

When a fan is moving fast, the blades appear as one. So the self, the ‘me’, seems to be a unified entity but if its activities can be slowed down, we shall perceive that it is not a unified entity but made up of many separate and contending desires and pursuits.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

— Joan Robinson

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

— Joan Robinson

Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold, the second we may name a precious jewel.

— Johannes Kepler

I imagine that the young graduate students [at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study] think ‘oh, this guy’s a loony, he did something good once’…and I really don’t care. I’ve been released from worrying about what other people think about me. And, in a way, he did do something interesting once.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.

— Joseph Fourier

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.

— Lao Tzu

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

— Lao Tzu

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.

— Leonard Euler

Madam, I have just come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.

— Leonhard Euler

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

When I put the ruler up against the table, am I always measuring the table; am I not sometimes checking the ruler?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don’t, for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.

— Maria Prophetissa

You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data.

— Marshall McLuhan

Provide shortcuts to old knowledge by organizing information, and explore means to discover new knowledge by organizing ignorance.

— Marshall McLuhan

The job of the teacher is to save the student time.

— Marshall McLuhan

When the crank’s I.Q. is low, as in the case of the late Wilber Glenn Voliva who thought the earth shaped like a pancake, he rarely achieves much of a following. But if he is a brilliant thinker, he is capable of developing incredibly complex theories. He will be able to defend them in books of vast erudition, with profound observations, and often liberal portions of sound science. His rhetoric may be enormously persuasive. All the parts of his world usually fit together beautifully, like a jig-saw puzzle.

— Martin Gardner

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

— Max Planck

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

— Michael Crichton

If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.

— Murray Gell-Mann

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, and idiots in labels.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

It’s not that correlation is not causation, but that correlation is not correlation.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Twitter

Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort. Effort is required to create unique knowledge.

— Naval Rakivant

The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something.

— Naval Rakivant

We will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

— Noam Chomsky

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

I am the jackdaw. Free, but uncertain.

— Olaf Stapledon

The merely fantastic has only minor power.

— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

An academic who has spent years on a hard problem is rarely grateful when you suggest that his field can be revived by bypassing it.

— Paul Krugman, How I Work

The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth.

— Paul Krugman, How I Work

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

— Richard Feynman

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.

— Richard Feynman

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism

— Sextus Empiricus

By skepticism . . . we arrive first at suspension of judgment, and second at freedom from disturbance.

— Sextus Empiricus

After I have trodden upon a cross formed by two straws … there comes to me from without a thought that I have sinned … this is probably a scruple and temptation suggested by the enemy.

— St. Ignatius of Loyola

I am my own reality check.

— Stephen Wolfram

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

— Virginia Woolf

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

— Virginia Woolf

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

— Virginia Woolf

Let us keep our minds open, by all means…But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!

— Walter Kotschnig

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.

— Wayne Gretzky