Favorite Quotations

Here are some quotations I’ve collected that go well with the theme of this website, the quest to be noble-minded:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” - Galileo Galilei
“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.” - René Descartes
“I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.” - Socrates
“Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.” - Mark Twain
“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” - John F. Kennedy
“Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: not one person thinks he needs any more of it than he already has.” - René Descartes
“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.” - Francis Bacon
“Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate—they seek it.” - E. O. Wilson
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them thay have been fooled.” - Mark Twain
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” - Richard Feynman
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Stephen Hawking
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” - Charles Darwin
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” - Mark Twain
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” - John Stuart Mill
“There is no reasoning a person out of a position they weren’t reasoned into.” - Jonathan Swift
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw
“It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.” - Bill Murray
“To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes
“He whose faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his faith.” - Robert Boyle
“He who begins by loving Christianity more than truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” - Blaise Pascal
“Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
“There is faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth.” - Paul Tillich
“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” - G. K. Chesterton
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” - Thomas Paine
“As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” - John Wheeler
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
“There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with artlessness.“ - Piet Hein
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Pithy statements are considered wiser when attributed to someone famous.” - Abraham Lincoln

OK, that last one might not be genuine.

Back to noble-minded.org home page