Category: Thought

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120), “On Listening to Lectures,” Moralia.

He said that those who were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs.

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 – 120) quoting Cato the Elder, Roman Apophthegms.

This is a beautiful country.

John Brown, last words (December 2, 1859), as quoted in John Brown and his Men (1894) by Richard Josiah Hinton, p. 397.

An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease, or drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not without a total revolution of the deepest self.

Doris Lessing on the slated role of the Giants on Earth, in her novel Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), p. 38.

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

Steven Wright, classic one-liner.

There is only one defense against existential death anxiety — denial, which banishes these feelings from consciousness to the deep unconscious.

Robert Langs, as quoted in Ajit Varki & Danny Brower, Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind (2013), p. 123.

Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Roger Bacon, in Robert Belle Burke The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2 (2002), p. 583.

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

William Whewell, Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, The Equilibrium of Forces on a Point (1819).

In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.

Herodotus, The Histories, Book I, Chapter 87.

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

Pericles, as quoted in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Book II (1945), Chapter 40.