Famous Quotes & Sayings

Arthur Koestler

When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

Anna C. Brackett

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

Stephen Jay Gould

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

Stephen Jay Gould

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

Alfred North Whitehead

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Plato

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

Plato

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.

Plato

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

Plato

Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter. Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy.

James Van Allen

My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete?

James Van Allen

Certainly one of the most enthralling things about human life is the recognition that we live in what, for practical purposes, is a universe without bounds.

Douglas Adams

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

Dalai Lama

The purpose of life is to be happy.

Simon Mainwaring

The future of profit is purpose.

Thomas Merton

The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.

Saadi

Riches are intended for the comfort of life, and not life for the purpose of hoarding riches.

Thomas Watson

This crown of free will is fallen from our head" and "If it be God's purpose that saves then it is not free will.

Reggie McNeal

You were created on purpose for a purpose.

Ayn Rand

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

Bryant H. McGill

We can each immediately liberate ourselves as victims in the world, through solidifying an intent to act.

Bryant H. McGill

The conflicts we have with the outside world are often conflicts we have within ourselves.

Charles Colson

The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

Jan Garbarek

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

Jared Diamond

Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Janine Benyus

Cooperation in the most natural thing in the world

Daniel Handler

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Daniel Handler

For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.