mellamokb’s most recent Quotables

There are only two ways to live your life: One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.

Knowledge and ego are directly related. The less knowledge, the greater the ego.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, economic doctrines, every hunter, forager, every hero, coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother, father, hopeful child, inventor, explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence

A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe. Sometimes I think we're not. In both cases the thought is equally shocking.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.