Gray Matters
Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
~ Albert Einstein
gravity happens before genius arrives
The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental:
it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Youth is a religion from which one always ends up converted.
— Andre Malraux
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. (Billions and Billions p. 215)
— Carl Sagan
We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact
that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
— H. G. Wells
The single biggest problem with communucation is the illusion
that it has taken place. — George Bernard Shaw
I almost think we're all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
— Henrik Ibsen
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
— Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man)
More Views
Learning is like a design in water,
contemplation like a design on the side of a wall,
meditation like a design in stone.
— Adept Godrakpa, "Hermit of Go Cliffs"
