When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. "The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country."
Alfred Thompson, Baron Denning
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
2. "It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative."
John Burroughs
3. "The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak."
Swedish proverb
Other categories: Oration and Silence -:- Question and Problem
4. "Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams."
Charles Baudelaire, "Artificial Paradise"
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
5. "Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journals"
Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia
6. "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
Bertrand Russell
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
7. "I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."
Bethania McKenstry
Other categories: Various
8. "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity."
Christopher Morley
Other categories: Normality and Madness
9. "One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience."
Alice James
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
10. "There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses."
Louis Aragon
11. "The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
12. "Education [...] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals."
G. M. Trevelyan, "English Social History"
Other categories: Education
13. "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."
Antonio Gramsci, "Gramsci: Letters from Prison"
Other categories: Optimism and Hope
14. "Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will."
Mikhail Bakunin
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
15. "We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within"
Other categories: Life and Death
16. "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."
Ronald Reagan
Other categories: Authority, Government
17. "In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting."
Stefan Zweig, "Stellar Moments in Human History"
Other categories: History and Nations
18. "What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?"
Harold Rosenberg
Other categories: Richness and Money
19. "All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Collected Essays"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
20. "Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers."
William Somerset Maugham, "A Writer?s Notebook"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
21. "Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation appled to life."
Henri-Frederic Amiel, "Journal Intime"
22. "Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists."
Henri-Frederic Amiel, "Journal Intime"
23. "Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe."
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), "Questions sur l’Encyclopédie"
Other categories: God and Religion
24. "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
Bertrand Russell
Other categories: Human
25. "Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to."
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Other categories: Various
26. "Beware of women who read—they also think."
Anne Holt
Other categories: Woman and Man
27. "Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
Laurence J. Peter
Other categories: Knowledge, Ignorance
28. "Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life’s vast flock of wild irrationalities."
Paul Eldridge, "Maxims for a Modern Man"
Other categories: Various
29. "Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."
Henrik Tikkanen
Other categories: Normality and Madness
30. "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant."
Helen Keller
31. "Wisdom does not trust to probabilities; it always marches in the midday light of reason."
Baltasar Gracian
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
32. "Today the greatest single source of wealth is between your ears."
Brian Tracy
Other categories: Richness and Money
33. "Common sense is not really so common."
Antoine Amauld, "The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic"
34. "Reason, vi. To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire."
Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil’s Dictionary"
35. "If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think."
Ashleigh Brilliant
Other categories: Oration and Silence
36. "Passion is the drunkenness of the mind."
Robert South
Other categories: Normality and Madness -:- Various
37. "Sometimes the path you're on is not as important as the direction you're heading."
Kevin Smith
Other categories: Various
38. "An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows."
Dwight David Eisenhower
Other categories: Knowledge, Ignorance
39. "When all else fails, men turn to reason."
Abba Eban
40. "Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once."
Johann Kaspar Lavater
Other categories: Talent and Genius
41. "An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore."
Edward de Bono
Other categories: Knowledge, Ignorance
42. "Reason in man is rather like God in the world."
St. Thomas Aquinas
43. "I know that you think you know what I said. But I'm not sure whether you understood that what you heard is what I meant."
Alan Greenspan
44. "A handful of common sense is worth a bushel of learning."
proverb
Other categories: Education
45. "The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand."
Cesare Lombroso
Other categories: Knowledge, Ignorance
46. "Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met."
Fran Lebowitz, "Social Studies"
Other categories: Sin and Conscience
47. "The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
Robert Lee Frost
Other categories: Work and Laziness
48. "The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious."
P. D. Ouspensky
49. "In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
Galileo Galilei
Other categories: Science and Technology
50. "Doubt is one of the names of intelligence."
Jorge Luis Borges
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
Layout based on template by Darren Hester, DesignsByDarren.com
