“If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.” — R.D. Laing
Quotations
Seeing and Believing
“Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.” — Leonardo
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“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.” — Benjamin Disraeli
“The multitude of books is making us ignorant.” — Voltaire
“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise.” — Oscar Wilde
“The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author, some for some kind of vanity to acquire celebrity and raise a name, others for the sake of lucre or gain.” — Martin Luther
“There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive.” — Robertson Davies
“The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.” — Bernard Shaw
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“All my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific.” — Lily Tomlin
Too Far
“I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the one who sold it.” — Will Rogers
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“I would rather discover a single causal connection than win the throne of Persia.” — Democritus
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“When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say uneventful.” — Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, in 1907
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“If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” — Will Rogers
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“Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.” — Aristotle
“Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?” — Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, 1949
Where wealth and freedom reign, contentment fails,
And honour sinks where commerce long prevails.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller, 1764
“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” – Epictetus
“The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them.” — Marquise de Lambert, A Mother’s Advice to Her Son, 1726
“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” — Bertrand Russell
“Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.” — Benjamin Franklin
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“Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” — Wernher von Braun
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” — Niels Bohr
“An expert is one who knows so much about so little that he neither can be contradicted, nor is worth contradicting.” — Henry Ward