Lab Microbial Systems Ecology


Quotes:

The purpose of this weblink is to examplify how different researchers from different fields approach various topics. These quotes have been collected under a random basis and represent only a minor fraction of what was said by these (as well as by other not yet listed researchers). The goal is not to state which quotes are correct, but rather to show various aspects and that each of them may have something worthwile to think around.

This website is under constant development, if you wish to correct or contribute with a quote, please email administrator<at>microbial-systems-ecology.de. Thank you.



Arts & Science
  • "When you say design, everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it´s an emotive word. Everybody thinks it´s how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything." - James Dyson.
  • "Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of art and science" - Albert Einstein.
  • "A visionary artist is an artist that paints with a bigger picture in mind than himself"- Ken Grimes.
  • “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” - Victor Hugo.
  • "Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty" - John Ruskin.
  • "...regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • "Music...stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi (an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting) which Leibniz took it to be.....The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • "Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears" - Erwin Schrödinger.
  • "The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal" - Leo Tolstoy.
  • "How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone";  "I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream"; "I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people"; "Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more" ; "When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars"; "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures" - Vincent van Gogh.
  • "An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic" - Heribert G. Wells.

Astrobiology (for philosophical and scientific speculations, see also Cosmos and Earth and Pioneers)
  • "In the smallest part of everything there are minute parts of all other things - Panspermia - everything contains seeds of all other things" - Anaxagoras.
  • "In a great number of the cosmogonic myths the world is said to have developed from a great water, which was the prime matter. In many cases, as for instance in an Indian myth, this prime matter is indicated as a solution, out of which the solid earth crystallized out" - Svante Arrhenius.
  • "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds" - Giordano Bruno.
  • "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice" - Richard Dawkins.
  • "...imagine, Sir, that the entire extent of the air visible to our eyes: the opaque globes they perceive, and those that which they do not discover; even the portions of the inflamed globes which are not yet reached by the fires; in a word imagine that this entire space is full of seeds of everything which can live in the universe" - Benoit de Mallet.
  • "If there were thousands of amateur systems (there are only a few at present), and there were a few civilizations with transmitters a million or so more times more powerful than the typical transmitter, an amateur system might just happen on a detectable signal first." - Frank Drake.
  • "Is there intelligent life on Earth?" - Frank Drake.
  • "There is an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it" - Epicurus (letters to Herodotus).
  • "One of the strongest arguments for an alien probe or ship to be in our vicinity or at nearby stars like epsilon erdiani is that the age of our galaxiy is 10 billion years - 10,000,000,000. This is more than enough time for an alien civilization to explore and spread out over the entire galaxy which is about a 100,000 light years in diameter. By using gamma and cosmic ray lasers, the use of binary dwarf + maybe even antimatter propulsion systems an alien ship could achieve one hundredth to one tenth the speed of light. In the span of a million years they could cross the entire width of our galaxy. Man is a million years old. Our civilization is 10,000 years and our space age a little over 50 years. An alien civilization several hundred or thousand years older than ours coud travel to their nearest stars. An E. T. civilization a billion years older tn earth´s could be a real possibility." - Ken Grimes.
  • "I believe that the most important thing that will happen in the new millennium ... will be the proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. While this will have many aspects of profound significance, nothing is more important in my estimation than the hope that this event will serve to bind together the peoples of planet earth and serve to emphasize the total futility of human conflict between groups and nations." - Robert Hawke (from the SETI league website).
  • Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it! -Immanuel Kant.
  • “Should the time come when this earth comes into collision with another body, comparable in dimensions to itself . . many great and small fragments carrying seeds of living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space. Hence, and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If at the present instance no life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation" - Lord Kelvin.
  • "We seek to answer a fundamental question that has haunted humankind -- are we alone?" ....Because the knowledge of existence of any other civilization will profoundly change our view of our place in the cosmos." - Los Angeles Daily News (from the SETI league website).
  • "Biology occupies a position among the sciences both marginal and central. Marginal because, the living world, constituting only a tiny and very 'special' part of the universe, it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the ultimate aim of the whole of science is indeed, as I believe, to clarify man's relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position, since of all the disciplines it is the one that endeavours to go most directly to the heart of the problems that must be resolved before that of 'human nature' can even be framed in other than metaphysical terms" - Jacques Monod.
  • "Because there's no reason that the laws of physics or chemistry are different elsewhere, there might be billions of Earth-like planets circling sun-like stars. Most of the planets are older than the earth and so have had more time to spawn life" - Popular Electronics (from the SETI league website).
  • If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space" - From The Movie Contact, based on novel by Carl Sagan.
  • "We could not guess how different from us they (extraterrestrials) might be. It was hard enough to guess the intentions of our elected representatives in Washington" - From The Movie Contact, based on novel by Carl Sagan.
  • "By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history" Carl Sagan.
  • "How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?... the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness... really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment...We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must also be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?" - Erwin Schrödinger.
  • "The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled" - Lewis Thomas.
  • "Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity" - Werner von Braun.

Biodiversity
  • "It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars" - David Attenborough.
  • "We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself" - Thomas Berry.
  • "Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?" - Scott Black.
  • Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? . . . Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?" - Kenneth E. Boulding.
  • A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love." - Stephen Jay Gould.
  • "What an extraordinary time to be alive. We’re the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life." - Frances Moore Lappe.
  • Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item" - Claude Levi-Strauss.
  • Every time we lose a species webreak a life chain which has evolved over 3.5 billion years" -Jeffrey McNeely.
  • "The current massive degradation of habitat and extinction of species is taking place on a catastrophically short timescale, and their effects will fundamentally reset the future evolution of the planet's biota." - National Academy of Sciences.
  • "Biological diversity is being lost at a rate unequalled since the appearance of modern ecosystems more than 40 million years ago. A quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction and nearly 70% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted" - Royal Society.
  • "The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us" - Edward O. Wilson.
  • "An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity"- Edward O. Wilson.
  • "We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity" - Edward O. Wilson.
  • "The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five or six times in the Earth's history." - World Wildlife Fund.

Chaos
  • "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit" - Henry Adams.
  • "What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos." - Diana Gabaldon.
  • "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." - C. G. Jung.
  • "One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos." - Dean Koontz.
  • "Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds" - George Santayana.

Cosmos and Earth (see also Astrobiology and Pioneers)
  • "One morning I woke up and decided to look out the window, to see where we were. We were flying over America and suddently I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit. Ligth and powdery, it blended with the contours of the land, with the veins of the rivers. I thought - autumn, snow - people are getting ready for winter. A few minutes later we were flying over the Atlantic, then Europe, and then Russia. I have never visited America, bit I imaginated that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you loook at. We are all Earth´s children, and we should treat her as our Mother." - Aleksandr Aleksandrov.
  • "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." - Neil Armstrong.
  • "We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves" - Ray Bradbury.
  • "There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal" - Ray Bradbury.
  • "We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts" - Ray Bradbury.
  • "All things are in the Universe, and the Universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity" - Giordano Bruno.
  • "The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way—the way God intended it to be—by giving everybody that new perspective from out in space." - Roger B Chaffee.
  • "I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified fa—ade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."- Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11.
  • "We are stardust, we are golden. We are a billion year old carbon". - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
  • "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty" - Albert Einstein (unsourced according to Wikipedia).
  • "I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us." .... "With the formulation of the Antropid Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos." - Vaclav Havel.
  • "I don’t know whether the universe, with its countless galaxies, stars and planets, has a deeper meaning or not, but at the very least, it is clear that we humans who live on this earth face the task of making a happy life for ourselves. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness."- His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
  • "We are but visitors on this planet. We are here for ninty or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives. If you contibute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life." - His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
  • "Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?" - Victor Hugo.
  • "In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law-the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water" - Victor Hugo.
  • "As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family."Hubert H. humphrey.
  • "As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man." -James B. Irwin.
  • “We may not be the center of the universe and the telos of evolution, but we are concrete embodiments of cosmic processes in their particular terrestrial variation. And, albeit accidentally, we did happen to evolve a most remarkable property: self -reflection. In virtue of this we may be among the very few species of natural systems in the universe which are able not only to sense the world and respond to it, but to know their own sensations and come to reasoned conclusions about the nature of the universe. To be a man is thus to have the almost unique opportunity of getting to know oneself and the world in which one lives. It is surely shortsighted to disregard this opportunity and confine oneself solely to the business of living. A failure to exploit our capability for rational knowledge is, moreover, contrary to the business of living.” - Ervin László.
  • "No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love. " - Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
  • "The apologists for space science always seem over-impressed by engineering trivia and make far too much of non-stick frying pans and perfect ball-bearings. To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers."-James Lovelock.
  • "...we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames.... To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulee whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papilla more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an unequalled music, a divine light...Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown...for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event ..." - Maurice Maeterlinck.
  • "When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." - John Muir, 1915.
  • The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries" - Carl Sagan.
  • "As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky" - Carl Sagan.
  • "Human history an be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing" - Carl Sagan.
  • "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another"- Carl Sagan.
  • "The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting" - Carl Sagan.
  • "Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" Carl Sagan.
  • "... In the light of the Big Band theory, the entire universe is more like a growing, developing organism than a machine slowly running out of steam" - Rupert Sheldrake (The Science Desilusion).
  • "Even if we were to receive and recognize such messages from a planet around a nearby star, communication would be very slow. The nearest star is about 4,2 light-years away, so even if we reply immediately, it will take 8,4 years between their sending a message and receivinig our reply. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, so it would take 100,000 years for radio messages to pass from one side of the galaxy to another, and 200,00 years before replies could be received. What civilization would have a life span and record-keeping system adequate to communicate over periods such as that? And as for communication with inhabitats of planets in other galaxies, forget it! The nearest regular galaxy to our own, the Andromeda galaxy, is 1,8 million light-years away, so replies will take 3,6 milion years to arrive.... If the transfer of thought can happen faster than the speed of light, then the whole question of interstellar and intergalactic communication looks very different, as it does when we broaden our thinking about intelligences elsewhere in the cosmos. Instead of confining our attention to minds of biological organisms, such as ourselves, living in technological civilizations, we can explore the possibility that planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters also have a kind of consciousness..." - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.- Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud.
  • "Above all, we must awaken to and overcome the great hidden anthropocentric projection that has virtually defined the modern mind: the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos by the modern self's own will to power." - Richard Tarnas.
  • "For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.- Donald Williams.
  • "Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling but not quite touching; Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose, crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful, I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter . . .the bond is there in my mind and memory; Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space." -Alfred Worden.

Creativity & Talent
  • "If you really want something, you will find a way. If you don´t want something, you will invent excuses" - Anonymous.
  • "Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you" - Frederic Amiel.
  • "Will localizes us; thought universalizes us" - Frederic Amiel.
  • "Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soul with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring" - Frederic Amiel.
  • "Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street" - William Blake.
  • "No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical" - When asked about the difference between thinking and being logical - Niels Bohr.
  • "You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics" - Coco Chanel.
  • "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein.
  • "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" - Albert Einstein.
  • "You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it" - Nail Gaiman.
  • "It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle" - Andre Gide.
  • "There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth" - Andre Gide.
  • "One must be something in order to do something" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "People think that mathematical truths are discovered by logical thought processes. But this is certainly not always so. The greatest and most epoch-making mathematical discoveries are first glimpsed with the inner eye, just as a work of art, before it is begun, is visualized in its entirety by the creative artist. And as the artist does not give it shape according to rules of the craft until this total view has been seen mentally, so the mathematician does not embark on a logical demonstration of some truth before recognizing it intuitively. The guideline for this recognition of a mathematical truth is, in many cases, the beauty of mathematical truth and the way in which it harmonizes both internally and with what is already known..." - Helmut Hasse.
  • "The invention of IQ does a great disservice to creativity in education" - Joel Hildebrand.
  • "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "All of the biggest technologtical inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness" - Mark Kennedy.
  • "If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it" - Charles Kettering.
  • "Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "The principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "True creativity often starts where language ends" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "Fantasy/imagination does not have to mean that you invent someting out of nothing - it is rather a way to see something in and between different phenomena" - Thomas Mann.
  • "Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death" - Thomas Mann.
  • "You can learn more about a man in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation" - Plato.
  • The question is not what you look at, but what you see" - Henry David Thoreau.
  • "Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model" - Vincent van Gogh.
  • "When I know that I have to work on a certain problem in a certain field, I realize that a great deal of conscious work and concentration is required; as likely as not exceeding on my own strength. My own efforts never produce a breakthrough, but only a certain amount of spadework along conventional lines. By concentrating hard, I slowly burn myself out, like a small fire. But if I can manage to relax properly (for minutes, or, if necessary, for days or months), I find that in certain circumstances at an unexpected moment, such as in the morning when I awake, I get an inspiration that more or less answers the problem concerned. Afterward, I have to concentrate again; this time on interpreting the inspiration for the understanding... " - Carl F. Weizsäcker.

Criticism
  • "If you cannot understand the criticism directed against you - try to understand the background of the criticism" - Anonymous.
  • "In anger nothing right nor judicious can be done" - Cicero.
  • "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves" - Carl G. Jung.

Development & Progress
  • The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become" - W. E. B. Du Bois.
  • "The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought" - Henry S. Commager.
  • "Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them" - Henry S. Commager.
  • "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination" - John Dewey.
  • "We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive"- Clive S. Lewis.
  • "He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft" - James R. Lowell.
  • "If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress" - Barack Obama.
  • "You can't say civilization don't advance -- for in every war, they kill you in a new way" - Will Rogers.
  • "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" - George B. Shaw.
  • "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen"- Henry D. Thoreau.

Ecology & Environmentalism

  • "All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated" - Kofi Annan.
  • "Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations" - Svante Arrhenius.
  • "We cannot command nature except by obeying her" - Francis Bacon.
  • "After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager" - William S. Burroughs.
  • "No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life" - Rachel Carson.
  • "I want to make it clear, if there is ever a conflict (between environmental quality and economic growth), I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape" -  "Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries" - Jimmy Carter.
  • "Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money" - Cree Indian Proverb.
  • "Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life." - His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
  • "People? People have been obsolete for years, They've made the world a place where there's no room left for their own kind" - Michael Ende.
  • "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed" - Mahatma Gandhi.
  • "I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals" - Mikhali Gorbachev.
  • "You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances.....it's our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to cease this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future"; "Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, "What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" We have to hear that question from them, now" - Al Gore.
  • "In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world--combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy.The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species." - Stanislav Grof.
  • "A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm." - Stanislav Grof.
  • "The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility"....."If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." - Vaclav Havel.
  • "As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it; ...The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures." - Vaclav Havel.
  • "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back" - Horace.
  • "The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it" - Aldo Leopold.
  • "Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture" - Aldo Leopold.
  • "The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering" - Aldo Leopold.
  • "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you humans are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet" - Agent Smith in The Matrix.
  • "Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhytmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another" - John Muir.
  • "Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle" - Rainer Maria Rilke.
  • "The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together.  All things connect"  - Chief Seattle.
  • "The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?" - Chief Seattle.
  • "A Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy" - Claudine Schneider.
  • "One Touch of nature makes the whole world kin" - William Shakespeare.
  • “If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.” - Rebecca Solnit.
  • "The mountains of things we throw away are greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the reckless exuberance of our production and waste seems to be the index" - John Steinbeck.
  • "To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem" - Douglas P. Wheeler.
  • "It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little" - Oscar Wilde.
  • "The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry" - Edward O. Wilson.
  • "I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature". Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you" - Frank L. Wright (unsourced according to Wikipedia).

Education & Teaching
  • "When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind" - Cicero.
  • "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn" - Winston Churchill.
  • "To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often" - Winston Churchill.
  • "One should practice much sense, not much learning" - Democritus.
  • "The good things of life are produced by learning with hard work; the bad are reaped of their own accord, without hard work" - Democritus.
  • "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school" - Albert Einstein.
  • "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education" - Albert Einstein.
  • "Einstein and his students: In the period that Einstein was active as a professor, one of his students came to him and said: "The questions of this year's exam are the same as last years!" "True," Einstein said, "but this year all answers are different." - Joke about Einstein, source unknown.
  • "Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat" - Martin Henry Fischer.
  • "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one" - Malcolm Forbes.
  • "To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education" - Victor Hugo.
  • "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" - Lao Zi.
  • "Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another" - Nelson Mandela.
  • Learning and enjoyment are the secret to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, enjoyment without learning dulls you. - Richard D. Precht.
  • "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea" - Antoine de Saint-Exúpery.
  • "Live with your century; but do not be its creature" - Friedrich Schiller.
  • "The key to education is the experience of beauty" - Friedrich Schiller.
  • "Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn" - Delmore Schwartz.
  • "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel" - Socrates.
  • "I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think" - Socrates.
  • "Education that consists in learning things and not the meaning of them is feeding upon the husks and not the corn" - Mark Twain.
  • "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress" - Heribert G. Wells.
  • "Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from" - Terry Tempest William.

Evolution
  • "Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them" - Marcus Aurelius.
  • "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" - Kenneth Boulding.
  • "The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop" - Edwin Conklin.
  • "Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun" - Richard Dawkins.
  • "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky.
  • "Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness" - Theodosius Dobzhansky.
  • "Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness"- Theodosius Dobzhansky.
  • "The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious–fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance" - Thomas Huxley.
  • "Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry" -Jacques Monod.
  • "Evolution in the biosphere is therefore a necessarily irreversible process defining a direction in time; a direction which is the same as that enjoined by the law of increasing entropy, that is to say, the second law of thermodynamics. This is far more than a mere comparison: the second law is founded upon considerations identical to those which establish the irreversibility of evolution. Indeed, it is legitimate to view the irreversibility of evolution as an expression of the second law in the biosphere" -Jacques Monod.
  • "A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it" -Jacques Monod.
  • "When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceiveably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts" - Jacques Monod.
  • "No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory" - Erwin Schrödinger.

Fiction & Science Fiction
  • “The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real” - Victor Hugo.
  • "The trouble with fiction...is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense" - Aldous Huxley.
  • "A myth is something that never was but is always happening. The DNA of the human psyche; we are all coded with myths" - Jean Houston.
  • "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere" - Carl Sagan.
  • "Science fiction. You're right, it's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that, it's nuts. You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an airplane, you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon? Atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history… of history" Carl Sagan.
  • "Anything a man can imagine, another can create" - Jules Vernes (probably source or citation about him).

Genius - Mind & Consciousness
  • "Genius is fostered by energy" - Cicero.
  • "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration" - Thomas Edison.
  • "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction" - Albert Einstein.
  • "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits" - Albert Einstein.
  • "The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed" - Ralph Emerson.
  • "Genius always finds itself a century too early" - Ralph Emerson.
  • "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm" - Ralph Emerson.
  • "Genius without education is like silver in the mine" - Benjamin Franklin.
  • "First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task" - Stephen J. Gould.
  • "Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use" - Arthur Koestler.
  • "To see things in the seed, that is genius" - Lao Zi.
  • "Genius sees the answer before the question" - Robert Oppenheimer.
  • "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind" - Louis Pasteur.
  • "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness" - Max Planck.
  • "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled" - Plutarch.
  • "Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • "Talent hits a target no-one else can hit; genius hits targets no-one else can see" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • "The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence." - John Tyndall.
  • "One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Holism & reductionism

  • "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." - Aristotle.
  • "There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality" - Werner K. Heisenberg.
  • "While reductionism has greatly advanced microbiology in the past 400 years, assembly of smaller pieces just could not explain the whole! Modern microbiologists are learning "system thinking" and "holism." Such an approach is changing our understanding of microbial physiology ...The limitations of reductionism forced scientists to begin adopting new strategies using emerging concepts such as interspecies interaction, microbial community, biofilms, polymicrobial disease, etc. These new research directions indicate that the whole is much more than the simple sum of its parts, since the interactions between different parts resulted in many new physiological functions which cannot be observed with individual components"  - From Kuramitsu et al., 2007. Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev.  71(4): 653.
  • "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces" - Aldo Leopold.
  • "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community" - Aldo Leopold.

Intelligence - Rationalism - Irrationalism
  • "Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart" - Henri Frederic Amiel.
  • "Ultimately, there may be intelligences on the horizon that we don't even know about.... One candidate that has emerged for consideration is spiritual or moral intelligence" - Thomas Armstrong.
  • "It may be important, even essential for the survival of the planet, that we acknowledge and cultivate an intelligence within us that somehow guides the other seven, making sure that their use is directed toward the common good of humankind. That intelligence may be outside of ourselves, as it was conceived of in ancient and medieval times, in a transpersonal, religious, or celestial realm. It may even be located deep within the soul of the earth, as supporters of the Gaia hypothesis have proposed. Or it may be in ourselves - but located in our hearts rather than our minds. However we conceive of it, to cultivate such a supraordinate intelligence may be the single most intelligent thing we will ever do" - Thomas Armstrong.
  • "Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent" - Isaac Asimov.
  • "I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer" - Albert Einstein.
  • "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality" - Albert Einstein.
  • "Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory" - Leonardo da Vinci.
  • "Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  • "The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "There is still one final intelligent test that we humans must learn to pass: to tolerate each other - all - and not just a few when it suits us...." - Heinz Haber."There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain." - Stanislav Grof.
  • "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers. Response upon being questioned as to his IQ, in interview with Deborah Solomon "The Science of Second-Guessing", The New York Times (12 December 2004)" - Stephen Hawking.
  • "Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four" - Stephen Hawking.
  • "It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions" - Stephen Hawking.
  • "We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, as must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play" - Immanuel Kant.
  • “Even the brain, that most delicate and complex of all known organs, is not merely a lot of neurons added together. While a genius must have more of the gray matter than a sparrow, the idiot may have just as much as the genius. The difference between them must be explained in terms of how those substances are organized.” - Ervin László
  • "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces" - Aldo Leopold.
  • "Reason can talk - however, only love can sing" - Joseph de Maistre.
  • "The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité" - Thomas Mann.
  • "Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death" - Thomas Mann.
  • "In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny" - John Stuart Mill.
  • "Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality" - Bertrand Russell.
  • "Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. ... Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of critique. ... Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference"  - Peter Sloterdijk.
  • "The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge" - Peter Sloterdijk.
  • "Intelligence isn't being able to answer questions: It's being able to ask them" - Frank Unibaum.
  • "If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Intuition & Imagination
  • "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself" – William Blake.
  • "To achieve great things, we must first dream" - Coco Chanel.
  • "No weary journeys need be taken, no expensive machinery employed... A winter´s storm, an open window, a bit of fur or velvet, and a common magnifier, will bring any curious inquirer upon his field of observation with all the necesary apparatus, and he has only to open his eyes to find the grand and beautiful laboratory of nature open to his inspection" - Frances Chickering.
  • Ironic definition: "Imagination is something that certain personalities cannot even try to imagine" - Gabriel Laub.
  • "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?" - Leonardo da Vinci.
  • "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination" - John Dewey.
  • "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution" - Albert Einstein.
  • "The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery" - Albert Einstein.
  • "Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research" - Marie Curie.
  • "The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced" - Andre Gide.
  • ""Therefore" is a word the poet must not know" - Andre Gide.
  • "There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer" - Robert Graves.
  • "What is imagination? Perhapts it is a shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul´s thought?"- Sir Rider Haggard.
  • "None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events." - Vaclav Havel.
  • “There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo.
  • "Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?" - Victor Hugo.
  • "The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition" - Clive S. Lewis.
  • "The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought" - Thomas Mann.
  • "I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it" - Thomas Mann.
  • "It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover" - H. Poincare.
  • "The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you" - Rainer Maria Rilke.
  • "Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination" - Bertrand Russell.
  • "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere" - Carl Sagan.
  • "Anything a man can imagine, another can create" - Jules Vernes (probably source or citation about him).
  • "Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.

Jokes
  • "Reason without sense of humour may work in some way, but not in the other way" (Verstand ohne Humor geht, umgekehrt nicht) - Bruno Jonas German Entertainer
  • "Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them" - Nils Bohr Noble Prize Laureate

Knowledge
  • "Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more" - Francis Bacon.
  • A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting" - Carlos Castaneda.
  • "To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge" - Nicolaus Copernicus.
  • "One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious… Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart." - His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
  • “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know, but if you listen, you may learn something new.” – His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
  • "There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge. . . observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination" - Denis Diderot.
  • "Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge" - Thomas Edison.
  • "As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it" - Albert Einstein.
  • "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge" - Albert Einstein.
  • "The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area except for a limited number of strictly practical purposes - We do not know what we are doing - And even then, when you think of it - We do not know much about thinking" - Thomas S. Eliot.
  • ´We shall not cease from exploration - And the end of all our exploring - Will be to arrive where we started - And know the place for the first time" - Thomas S. Eliot.
  • "You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely" - Max Frisch.
  • "The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced" - Andre Gide.
  • ""Therefore" is a word the poet must not know" - Andre Gide.
  • "Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly—and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity)" - Stephen J. Gould.
  • "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel.
  • The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped [with its "unconditional faith in objective reality and complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws"] appears to have exhausted its potential. The relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It produces a state of schizophreneia: man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically scinece treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. We may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience" - Immanuel Kant.
  • "All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas" - Immanuel Kant.
  • "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power" - Lao Zi.
  • "This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours"- John Locke.
  • "What we know is a droplet, what we dont know is an ocean" - Isaac Newton.
  • "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" - Carl Sagan.
  • "This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • "Reason is feminine in nature: it will give only after it has received" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
  • “Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. ... This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory—the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit). ... Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power..." - Peter Sloterdijk.
  • "Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. ... The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically" - Peter Sloterdijk.
  • "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" / "The more you know, the more you realise that you know nothing" - Socrates.
  • "A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it" - John Steinbeck.
  • "Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster" - Lord Tennyson.
  • "We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter" -  Mark Twain.
  • "For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness" -  Mark Twain.
  • "Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.
  • "We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely" - Edward O. Wilson.
  • "Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Life and death - scientific speculations

  • "The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living" - Arthur C. Clarke.
  • "Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis." - Edwin Conklin.
  • Does this then mean that they "died" while they were "dead"? - John C. Crowe, on the remarkable biology of Tardigrada.
  • "If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!" - Richard Dawkins.
  • "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here" - Richard Dawkins.
  • "The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death." -Stanislav Grof.
  • "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image" - Stephen Hawking.
  • "We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning" - Maurice Maeterlinck.
  • "There are living systems; there is no living 'matter.' No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell" - Jacques Monod.
  • "Death is not the opposite of life; it exists as a part of them" - Haruki Murakami.
  • "Life and living are words that the scientist has borrowed from the plain man. The loan has worked satisfactorily until comparatively recently, for the scientist seldom cared and certainly never knew just what he meant by these words. Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up them and coin others" - Norman W Pirie.
  • "How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?... the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness... really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment...We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must also be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?" - Erwin Schrödinger.
  • "This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world." - Erwin Schrödinger.
  • "To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world." - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • "Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another" - Socrates.
  • "Life could not change the sun or water the dessert, so it changed itself" - John Steinbeck.
  • "The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled" - Lewis Thomas.
  • "Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms" - Lewis Thomas.
  • Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else" - Lewis Thomas.
  • "I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell" - Lewis Thomas.
  • "Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles." - John Tyndall.
  • "A samurai once asked Zen Master Hakuin where he would go after he died. Hakuin answered "How am I supposed to know?""How do you know? You're a Zen master!" exclaimed the samurai. "Yes, but not a dead one", Hakuin answered" - Zen Mondo.

Life and Death - philosophical speculations
  • "To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible — and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you" - William N. P. Barbelion.
  • "....We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
    So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all" - Ray Bradbury.
  • "Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day". - Ray Bradbury.
  • "I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? ... If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves" - Joseph Campbell.
  • "For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life." - Stanislav Grof.
  • "Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up" - Dag Hammarskjöld.
  • "God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reasoning. When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism" - Dag Hammarskjöld. (unsourced according to Wikipedia).
  • "Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.... I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive...Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away." - Dag Hammarskjöld.
  • "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "One must work and dare if one really wants to live; What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?" - Vincent van Gogh.
  • "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death" - Werner von Braun.
  • "Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning" - Heribert G. Wells.

Management

  • "The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides" - Frederic Amiel.
  • "A man without passion is only a latent force, only a possibility, like a stone waiting for the blow from the iron to give forth sparks" - Frederic Amiel.
  • "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties" - Francis Bacon.
  • "Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?" - Cicero.
  • "Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. We need a little more compassion, and if we cannot have it then no politician or even a magician can save the planet" - Dalai Lama.
  • "There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint" - Diderot.
  • "Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike..." - Albus Dumbledore (from Harry Pottter).
  • "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless" - Thomas Edison.
  • "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work"- Thomas Edison.
  • "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed"  - Albert Enstein.
  • "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" - Albert Enstein.
  • "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character" - Albert Enstein.
  • "Don't bother to just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself" - William Faulkner.
  • "Satisfaction does not come with achievement, but with effort. Full effort is full victory" - Mahatma Gandhi.
  • "Find purpose, the means will follow" - Mahatam Gandhi.
  • "Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding" - Andre Gide.
  • "The deed is everything, the glory nothing" - Johann W. von Goethe.
  • "The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. / Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking" - Stephen Hawking.
  • "They knew a tremendous number of things — But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?" - Helmut Hesse.
  • "It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement" - Helmut Hesse.
  • "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored" - Aldous Huxley.
  • "Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is" - William James.
  • "We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh"- William James.
  • "Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task"- William James.
  • "Self respect is not a matter of what you are doing in your life, but rather of how you are doing it. It requires that you bring quality and virtue into each action, whatever that action maybe" - Dadi Janki.
  • "I have never encountered a difficulty that was not truly the difficulty of myself" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves" - Carl G. Jung.
  • "We are not rich because of the things that we possess, but for what we can do without possessing them" - Immanuel Kant.
  • "You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them" - Charles Kettering.
  • "Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull" - Charles Kettering.
  • "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too... If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; if you can think — and not make thoughts your aim... If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same... If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it...- Rudyard Kipling.
  • "A journey of a thousand [miles] starts with a single step" - Lao Zi.
  • “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men” - Lao Zi.
  • “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”  - Clive S. Lewis.
  • "The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life" - Thomas Mann.
  • "Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership" - Karl Popper.
  • "Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything" - Rainer Maria Rilke.
  • "People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it" - Rainer Maria Rilke.
  • "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult" - Seneca.
  • "Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Marvels & Miracles
  • "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." - Aristotle.

Microbiology
  • "For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria" - Richard Dawkins.
  • “Although they're small, these tiny microbial species are the engines of the biosphere, and in large part drive the cycles of matter and energy in the sea” - Edward de Long.
  • “By reading the information stored in the genomes of entire microbial communities, we can begin to measure the pulse of this marine ecosystem. These new DNA sequences from microbial communities will help us paint the picture of how that world works and provide important details on the players involved and their biological properties and activities”- Edward de Long.
  • More in progress...

Moral & Ethics
  • “One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean” - Victor Hugo.
  • "The death of dogma is the birth of morality" - Immanuel Kant.
  • "To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking" - Immanuel Kant.
  • “The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. Martin L. King.
  • “Evolving our consciousness is not something we do only for ourselves — it is something we do also for others... for all others, and for the Earth. Because when we open up and let our body and mind feel our ties with others and with nature, we change ourselves, and change others around us. When a sufficient number of people pray or meditate together, or find another path to evolve their consciousness, other people are affected as well. More sick people heal, divorce and suicide rates drop, crime and violence diminish. When many people open up, a powerful force develops — a leap of consciousness takes place. All the great prophets and sages of history knew this, Jesus as well as the Buddha, Mohammed as well as Zoroaster — and more recently Bahá'u'lláh the same as Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and the Dalai Lama.” - Ervin László
  • "In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I and whither go I?" - Erwin Schrödinger.
  • "I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics" - Albert Schweitzer.
  • "Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened" - Madame de Stael.

New Paradigms
  • "The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term "ecological" is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. [...] This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. ...Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both" - Fritjof Capra.
  • "A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm."- Stanislav Grof.
  • "The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death." - Stanislav Grof.
  • "The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tine particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now." Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies — it must be rooted in self-transcendence: Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man" / "The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility" /"Today's world, as we all know, is faced with multiple threats. From whichever angle I look at this menace, I always come to the conclusion that salvation can only come through a profound awakening of man to his own personal responsibility, which is at the same time a global responsibility" - Vaclav Havel.
  • "I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation." - Albert Hofman.
  • "The success of the paradigm... is at the start largely a promise of success ... Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise... Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science... That enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others." - Thomas Kuhn.
  • "Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic." - Thomas Kuhn.
  • "The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well." - Thomas Kuhn.
  • "The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals." - Thomas Kuhn.
  • “Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative -- the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships.” -Ervin László
  • “When the classical worldview was applied to social science, the dominant notions turned out to be struggle for survival, the profit of the individual, with at best an assumed automatic coincidence of individual and societal good (through Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). When the systemic vision inspires the theories of social science, the values of competition are mitigated by those of cooperation, and the emphasis on individualistic work ethos is tempered with a tolerance of diversity and of experimentation with institutions and practices that foster man-man and man- nature adaptation and harmony.” - Ervin László
  • "We must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways...." - Joanna Macy.
  • “If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”  Dorothy L. Sayers.
  • "The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled." - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • "The sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are set free." - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • "I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about." - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • "... If nature evolves, why shouldn´t the laws of nature evolve as well? How could we possibly know that the "laws" that govern you and me - the crystallizationof sugar, the weather, and so on -were allthere at the moment of Big Bang?" - Rupert Sheldrake.
  • "Ours is an age between worldviews, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated.  Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like" - Richard Tarnas.
  • "Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic"- Edward O. Wilson.

    Paradox
    • "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress" - Niels Bohr.
    • "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth." - Niels Bohr.
    • The Paradoxical Commandments: People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anywayWhat you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. - Kent M. Keith.

    Pioneers
    • "It's tiny out there...it's inconsequential. It's ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth." - Bill Anders, Apollo 8.
    • "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong.
    • "I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul … we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream." - Neil Armstrong.
    • "Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are." - Felix Baumgartner.
    • "If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers." - Felix Baumgartner.
    • "What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth.... The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots.... When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black." -Yuri Gagarin.
    • "If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon."- Galileo Galilei.
    • "How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot." Christiaan Huygens.
    • "We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you've ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself—all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are, but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy loving here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself." - Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 & 13.
    • Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory. - Archibald MacLeish (1943, 25 years later this appeared on the first page of the New York Times after man had landed on the moon for the first time).
    • "Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it´s the only thing that ever has" - Margaret Mead.
    • "We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.....My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity."- Edgar Mitchel, Apollo 14.


    Research & Problem Solution
    • "It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem" - Malcolm Forbes.
    • "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer" - Rainer Maria Rilke.
    • "The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them" - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
    • "Discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought" - Albert Szent-Györgyi.
    • "The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them" - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
    • “Ask and you shall receive" is the rule, but you must learn how to ask and how to receive” - Gary Zukav.


    Science
    • "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...." - Isaac Asimov.
    • "All models are wrong, but some are useful" - George E. P. Box.
    • "Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom" - Simone de Beauvoir.
    • "Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply,- there are always new worlds to conquer" – Sir Humphry Davy.
    • "In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go" - Denis Diderot.
    • "A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone" - Denis Diderot.
    • "All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs" - Denis Diderot.
    • "There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint" - Denis Diderot.
    • "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking" - Albert Einstein.
    • "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong" - Richard Feynman.
    • "Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality" - Stephen J. Gould.
    • "Science is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma'am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. […] At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon" - Stephen J. Gould.
    • "Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science— or of any honest intellectual inquiry" - Stephen J. Gould.
    • "Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena."- Stanislav Grof.
    • "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory" - Stephen Hawking.
    • "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" - Stephen Hawking.
    • "If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God" - Stephen Hawking.
    • "He's a Platonist and I am a positivist. He's worried that Schrödinger´s cat is in a quantum state, where it is half dead and half alive. He feels that can't correspond to reality. But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I do not know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I am concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum theory does this very successfully. It predicts that the result of an observation is either that the cat is alive or that it is dead. It is like you can't be slightly pregnant; you either are or you aren't" - Stephen Hawking.
    • "Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic." - Thomas Kuhn.
    • "Nothing shocks me. I´m a scientist" - Indiana Jones.
    • "Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five" - Arthur Koestler.
    • "The word theory has the same Greek root as theatre. Both are concerned with putting on a show. A theory in science is no more than what seems to its author a plausible way of dressing up the facts and presenting them to the audience..." - James Lovelock.
    • "Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things" - Isaac Newton.
    • "There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors" - Robert Oppenheimer.
    • Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world" - Louis Pasteur.
    • "Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view" - Max Planck.
    • "Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones; so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science" - Henry Poincare.
    • "Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification" - Karl Popper.
    • "Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination" - Bertrand Russell.
    • "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - Ernest Rutherford.
    • "Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact" - Carl Sagan.
    • "There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny" - Carl Sagan.
    • "In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way" - Carl Sagan.
    • "It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it" - Carl Sagan.
    • "On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows all the answers. The details all still need working out but , in principle , the fundamental questions are settled." - Rupert Sheldrake.
    • "It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself." - Rupert Sheldrake.
    • "Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories" - R. Sheldrake.
    • "Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand" - Herbert G. Wells.
    • "Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.

    Science & Mysticism
    • "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour" - William Blake.
    • "I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale" - Marie Curie.
    • "I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can" - Charles Darwin.
    • "Were we really more advanced than the alchemists of Carmona? We had brought to light certain facts that they were not aware of, we had organised them into the right order; but had we advanced even a step nearer to the mysterious heart of the universe?" - Simone de Beauvoir.
    • "One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it" - Denis Diderot.
    • "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed" - Albert Einstein.
    • "Genuine science and authentic religion do not compete for the same territory; they represent two approaches to existence, which are complementary, not competitive. Science studies phenomena in the material world, the realm of the measurable and weighable, while spirituality and true religion draw their inspiration from experiential knowledge of the aspect of the world that Jungians refer to as "imaginal," to distinguish it from imaginary products of individual fantasy or psychopathology." - Stanislav Grof.
    • “Materialistic science does not have a place for any form of spirituality and considers it to be essentially incompatible with the scientific worldview. It perceives any form of spirituality as an indication of lack of education, superstition, gullibility, primitive magical thinking or a serious psychopathological condition. Modern consciousness research shows that spirituality is a natural and legitimate dimension of the human psyche and of the universal order of things. However, it is important to emphasize that this statement refers to direct authentic spirituality based on personal experience and not to the ideology and dogmas of organized religions.” – Stanislav Grof.
    • "The relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist." - Albert Hofman.
    • "In studying the literature connected with my work, I became aware of the great universal significance of visionary experience. It plays a dominant role, not only in mysticism and the history of religion, but also in the creative process in art, literature, and science. . More recent investigations have shown that many persons also have visionary experiences in daily life, though most of us fail to recognize their meaning and value." - Albert Hofman.
    • Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet" - Arthur Koestler.
    • “With the ever growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play reminding us of our humanity. There is no contradiction between the two. Each gives us valuable insights into the other. Both science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of all things.” - His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
    • “One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation.” - Ervin László
    • "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve" - Max Planck.
    • "Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it" - Max Planck.
    • "Through modern physics materialism has transcended itself". - Sir Karl Popper.
    • "I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed" -Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "I am born into an environment — I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am. This is my situation as yours, every single one of you. The fact that everyone always was in this same situation, and always will be, tells me nothing. Our burning question as to the whence and whither — all we can ourselves observe about it is the present environment. That is why we are eager to find out about it as much as we can. That is science, learning, knowledge;  it is the true source of every spiritual endeavour of man. We try to find out as much as we can about the spatial and temporal surroundings of the place in which we find ourselves put by birth..." - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "You may ask — you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity: gnothi seauton... get to know yourself!" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • "We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them" - Erwin Schrödinger.
    • “I would rather have a mind opened by Wonder than one closed by belief.” – Gerry Spence.
    • "... what science now reveals to us goes far beyond anything that any tradition in the past has been able to glimpse. They didn´t have telescopes, or radio telescopes, or a sense of the vastness of the universe that science has opened up, or a knowledge of the variety of heavenly bodies, or the story of cosmic evolution. As we leave the old, machinelike universe and move toward a more organic sense of evolving nature, we need to ask what kinds of consciousness are there in the unverse besides our own". - Rupert Sheldrake.
    • "How full of the creative genius is the air in which these (snowflakes) are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand" - Henry David Thoreau.
    • “It is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.” – Ken Wilber.
    • "The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist" - Frank L. Wright.

    Stupidity and Errors

    • "Intelligence is the ability to articulate one's stupidity" - Anomymous.
    • "A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top" - Anomymous.
    • "Who is in the position to mark somebody as a true genius, far beyond his own time, or as a crazy person, a simple jester?  In ancient times, even the role of a simple jester was often regarded as high - he was the only person who was allowed to criticize the king or the leader from a humorous point of view - to remind the authorities about their mortality and perishableness" - Anonymous.
    • "Calling other people for stupid doesn´t make yourself so much better - is it really noble to laugh at other people´s stupidity - it may make you feel smarter for a while - but what did this attitude do to improve "stupidity" from a longer perspective? - nothing - all it did was evoking some intolerant thoughts" - Anomymous.
    • "I love fools' experiments. I am always making them" - Charles Darwin.
    • "Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike..." - Albus Dumbledore (from Harry Potter).
    • "Any fool can know. The point is to understand" - Albert Einstein.
    • "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits" - Albert Einstein.
    • "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I´m not sure about the former" - Albert Einstein.
    • "The dumbest people I know are those who know it all" - Malcolm Forbes.
    • "The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes" - Andre Gide.
    • What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind” - Victor Hugo.
    • "At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols" - Aldous Huxley.
    • "To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor" - James Joyce.
    • "We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself... " - Carl G. Jung.
    • "The fact, that some  humans are so tempted to fill their mad houses with so called insane people, shows only how desperate they are to prove to other humans that they are not insane"  - Charles de Montesquieu.
    • "Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?" - Steve Polyak.  
    • "As we age, we become crazier and wiser" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "The desire to appear clever often prevents one from being so" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "There are foolish people who recognize their foolishness and use it skillfully" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "Passion often makes a fool of the cleverest man and often makes the most foolish men clever" - François Rochefoucauld.
    • "At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." - Carl Sagan.
    • "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.
    • "Our greatest stupidities may be very wise" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

    Success & Failure
    • "A person is only as big as the dream they dare to live"; "Another failure is just another different result, but not the desired one"; "If at first you don't succeed, redefine success"; "Failure teaches you how not to do things"; "Making mistakes isn´t the problem. It´s not doing our best to fix them after that leads to ruin"; "He that has nothing but merit to support him is in fair way to starve"; "If you have a problem, try to solve it. If you cannot solve it, don´t make another problem of it. - Anonymous.
    • "The only limit is the one you set yourself." - Felix Baumgartner.
    • "I dont mind the failure but I can´t imagine that I would forgive myself if I didn´t try." - Felix Baumgartner.
    • "Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure" - Kenneth Boulding.
    • "Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it" - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
    • "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm" - Winston Churchill.
    • "In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment" - Charles Darwin.
    • "Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.... Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.... Life is a mountain of solvable problems and I enjoy that."- James Dyson.
    • "Opportunity is missed by most people because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work" - Thomas Edison.
    • "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless" - Thomas Edison.
    • "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work". Variant: "I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work" - Thomas Edison.
    • "I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom"; "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up" - Thomas Edison.
    • "It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service" - Albert Einstein.
    • "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value" - Albert Enstein.
    • "Don't bother to just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself" - William Faulkner.
    • "It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle" - Andre Gide.
    • "It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead... to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "He who feared that he would not succeed sat still" - Horace.
    • "It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome"; "Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune"; "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does"; "Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action"; "Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power"; "If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it"; "It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true" - William James.
    • "In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime" - Andre Gide.
    • "I have never encountered a difficulty that was not truly the difficulty of myself" - Carl G. Jung.
    • "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves" - Carl G. Jung.
    • "No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm" - Charles Kettering.
    • "The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed" - Charles de Montesquieu.
    • "I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise" - Charles de Montesquieu.
    • "We have to acknowledge the progress we made, but understand that we still have a long way to go. That things are better, but still not good enough" - Barack Obama.
    • "Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings" - Arthur Rubinstein.
    • "Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
    • "A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt"- Arthur Schopenhauer.
    • "To free a man from error does not mean to take something from him, but to give him something" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
    • "Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must not be lost" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
    • “I attribute any important successes I may have enjoyed in my life to rejection.” - Gerry Spence
    • "I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction" - John Steinbeck.
    • "To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence" - Mark Twain.
    • "If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced" - Vincent van Gogh.
    • "It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all to prudent" - Vincent van Gogh.
    • "Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes" - Oscar Wilde.
    • "I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm — but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity" - Vincent van Gogh.
    • "If you fell down yesterday, stand up today"; "The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow" - Heribert G. Wells.

    Taxonomy - collection partly composed by Dr. Brian Tindall DSMZ
    • "Clearly, a “structural genomics” approach to the ribosome, which would have entailed determining the structures of all of the proteins and all possible rRNA fragments, neither would have provided the relevant structures of all of the pieces nor would it have shown their relative positions. Indeed, the structure of the large ribosomal subunit highlights the importance of structural studies of entire assemblies that show biological activity." - Ban, N., Nissen, P., Hansen, J., Moore, P.B. &  Steitz, T.A. Science 289 905-919.
    • "….once again there is a sharp division of opinion among taxonomists, not a little acrimony, and, for good measure, prejudice of a bitter kind not normally associated with scientists." -Cowan, 1978.
    • "It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience' sake"; "It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant." - Charles Darwin.
    • "For more than a century the field of biology was so extensive and growing so rapidly that no single investigator, no matter how broad might be his grasp, could keep abreast with the developments in all the numerous branches. The response of biology to this challenge was a subdivision of the general field into many disciplines, each endowed with its own material, methods, and techniques. Instead of being biologists most of us became systematists, physiologists, geneticists, embryologists, biochemists, pathologists, etc."...."This extreme compartmentalisation of biological knowledge proved fruitful in that it led to enormous accumulation of factual information; it has been deleterious in so far as it resulted in a lack of understanding between the representatives of the various disciplines and a consequent lowering of the efficiency of biological research.  It stands to reason that the exigencies of the situation continue, and probably will continue, to demand that each biologist be a specialist in some small portion of the general field. During the last decade the conclusions reached by many of the specialists have begun to converge toward a set of general principles applicable to the entire realm of living matter. One can only hope that this will occur in increasing measure in future. Biology, it seems, is no longer in its childhood; as a science, it is approaching maturity" - Dobzhansky in the introduction to Mayr, 1942. 
    • "The field of inferring phylogenies has been wracked by outrageously excessive controversy, often marked by behaviour that would not be condoned in other more mature fields of science." - Felsenstein, 2004.
    • "Currently, the only major prerequisite for designating novel taxonomic ranks higher than the species rank is that clustering by 16S rRNA gene data should support such designations. Nonetheless, there is great comparative value in having a taxonomic system predictive of phenotypic and genetic relatedness of the grouped organisms and taxonomic ranks that are comparable, in terms of absolute differences and similarities, among lineages. It remains unclear, however, how the prokaryotic taxonomy is performing with regard to these issues, partly due to the focus on the 16S rRNA gene, which has overlooked the overall biochemical or genetic relatedness at the whole-cell level." - Konstantinidis & Tiedje J.Bact 187: 6258-6264, 2005.
    • "The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men." - Locke, 1689.
    • "What is exposed to natural selection is not the individual gene or the genotype but rather the phenotype, the product of the interactions of all genes with each other and with the environment." - Ernst Mayr, 1959.
    • "The ends of scientific classification are best answered when the objects are formed into groups respecting with a greatest number of propositions can be made." - Mill, 1843.
    • "rRNA sequencing or rRNA-DNA hybridisation provide a hierachical framework of the relationships among bacterial species, but do not provide any effective information for the circumscription of taxa above the species level." - Murray et al. IJSB 40: 213-215, 1990.
    • "The species concept is a recurrent controversial issue that preoccupies philosophers as well as biologists of all disciplines..... the today´s specialist (in taxonomy) is a much more dynamic, actively incorporating new methodologies, open for discussions, and aware that this field of science is slowly being taken more seriously...." - Rossello-Mora and Amann, 2001.
    • "Biologists (who should know better) are apt to assume that systematics must be simple and are liable to debate the issues with a naiveté that would not be accepted in other sciences. We greatly need good teaching of the bases of classification." - Sneath, 1995.
    • "Most of the planned activities for solving taxonomic and evolutionary problems concentrate on genomics and there is a trend to forget that there are things out there which are neither genes nor proteins that have a documented usefulness in systematics." - Brian Tindall.
    • "There should not be further designation of hierachical taxonomic levels without substantial chemotaxonomic and sequence data to support the proposal." - Wayne et al. IJSB 37: 463-464, 1987. 
    • "The arrangement obtained from one set of characters coincides with the arrangement from another set." - Whewell, 1840.
    • "Phylogenies derived from sequence analysis have to be accepted for what they minimally are: hypotheses, to be tested and either strengthened or rejected on the basis of other kinds of data." - C.R.Woese 1978.
    • ‘"it will be determined to what extent the phylogenetic trees derived from molecular data in complete independence from the results of organismal biology, coincides with the phylogenetic tree constructed on the basis of organismal biology. If the two phylogenetic trees are mostly in agreement with respect to the topology of branching, the best available single proof of the reality of macro-evolution would be furnished." - Zuckerkandl & Pauling 1965.

    Time
    • "An inch of time, an inch of gold. But you can't buy back an inch of time with an inch of gold" - Anonymous.
    • "It is easy to loose a day, but impossible to get it back" - Anonymous.
    • "Time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure" - Antiphon the Sophist.
    • "The experience of a lifetime is the privilege of being who you are" - Joseph Campbell.
    • "Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss" - Joseph Campbell.
    • "Do you know at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity if you so desire?" - Carlos Castaneda.
    • "There´s nothing wrong with things taking time." - James Dyson.
    • "Time is an illusion" - Albert Einstein.
    • "Millions of humans long for eternal life, and yet they get bored on a rainy Sunday afternooon" - Susan Ertz.
    • "On time present and time past : Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable" - Thomas S. Eliot.
    • About time: ""Time is Life.... Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time ... Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart,and the more people saved, the less they had... When you're dead, it'll be as if you'd never existed. If you only had the time to lead the right kind of life, you'd be quite a different person. Time is all you need, right?... Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it..." - Michael Ende.
    • About how humans use time: "There's a lot more to human beings than the time they carry around inside them, but it's different with the men in grey. Stolen time is all they consist of, and that disappears in a flash when they're exposed to temporal suction. It escapes like air from a burst balloon, the only difference being that a balloon's skin survives. In their case, there's nothing left at all...The lives of the people who inhabited this desert followed a similar pattern: they ran dead straight for as far as the eye could see. Everything in them was carefully planned and programmed, down to the last move and the last moment of time... In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum of delay..... People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker and more monotonous ..." - Michael Ende.
    • "Time does not change us, it just unfolds us" - Max Frisch.
    • "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of" - Benjamin Franklin.
    • "Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on. Time is a child, moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child's" - Heraclitus.
    • "You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow" - Janis Joplin.
    • "There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present" - James Joyce.
    • Nobody is ever that busy that he does not even find time to tell everybody how busy he is. - Robert Lemke.
    • "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" - John Lennon.
    • "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is" - Carl S. Lewis.
    • "Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols" - Thomas Mann.
    • "Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment" - Thomas Mann.
    • "Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we have time?" - From Matrix.
    • "Time is the soul of this world" - Pythagoras.
    • "We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual" - Paul Ricoeur.
    • "Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn" - Delmore Schwartz.
    • "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar. Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is, Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans, Show minutes, times, and hours" - William Shakespeare.
    • "There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace" - King Solomon, The Bible Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ("A Time for Everything").
    • "Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal" - Star Trek.
    • "We loose most of the time when we try to save it" - John Steinbeck.
    • "Each moment is a place you've never been" - Mark Strand.
    • "Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide" - Mark Twain.
    • "They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself" - Andy Warhol.
    • "We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is" - Herbert G. Wells.
    • "The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn" - Herbert G. Wells.
    • "You know well enough what I mean by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.
    • "Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.

    Truth
    • "Between the truth and the search for truth, I choose the latter" - Anonymous.
    • "If we ever find something that is "true" - we should value it and present it with dignity, instead of throwing it as a dirty washrag in front of other peoples faces - Anonymous.
    • "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth." - Niels Bohr.
    • "I made a great discovery. I don't believe in anything anymore. Objects do not exist for me, except that there is a harmonious relationship among them, and also between them and myself. When one reaches this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual void. This where everything becomes possible, everything becomes legitimate, and life is a perpetual revelation. This is true song" - Georges Braque.
    • "I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me" - Simone de Beauvoir.
    • "The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution. - Albus Dumbledore (in Harry Potter).
    • "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." - Albert Einstein.
    • "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." - Galileo Galilei.
    • "See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary." - Galileo Galilei.
    • "Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth." - Mahatma Gandhi.
    • "It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
    • "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory" - Stephen Hawking.
    • "There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them — isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "When a person tries to act in accordance with his conscience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said" - Vaclav Havel.
    • "Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity. . ." - Vaclav Havel.
    • "Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors." - Thomas Henry Huxley.
    • I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Isaac Newton.
    • "There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny" - Carl Sagan.
    • "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident" - Arthur Schopenhauer.
    • "Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth" - Jules Vernes.
    • "Love truth, but pardon error" - Voltaire.
    • "It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong" - Voltaire.
    • "An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie" - Heribert G. Wells.
    • "Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?" - Oliver Wendel Holmes.
    • "There are no whole truths. All truths are half truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." - Oscar Wilde.
    • "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple" - Oscar Wilde.
    • "It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

    Values & Worth

    • "The most valuable things in life are priceless" - Anonymous.
    • "Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it" - Confucius.
    • "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood" - Marie Curie.
    • “Your beliefs become your thoughts,Your thoughts become your words,Your words become your actions,Your actions become your habits,Your habits become your values,Your values become your destiny.” - Mahatma Gandhi.
    • “We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out bu intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words.” - Barack Obama.

    Wisdom

    • "Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse" - Anonymous.
    • "Knowledge cuts up the world. Wisdom makes it whole" - Anonymous.
    • "A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top" - Anomymous.
    • "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom" - Isac Assimov.
    • "More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
    • "It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err" - Mahatma Gandhi.
    • "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again" - Andre Gide.
    • "Though wisdom is common, yet many live as if they had a wisdom of their own" - Heraclitus.
    • "Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it" - Hermann Hesse.
    • "They knew a tremendous number of things — But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?" - Hermann Hesse.
    • "Force without wisdom falls of its own weight" - Horace.
    • "He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!" - Horace.
    • "Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life" - Immanuel Kant.
    • "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power" - Lao Zi.
    • "A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something" - Plato.
    • "Wisdom begins in wonder" - Socrates.
    • "Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness" - Sophocles.
    • "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more" - Alfred Tennyson.
    • "Our greatest stupidities may be very wise" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.


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    This website works best with the explorer browser. Last updated on 3 April 2015. Lab Microbial Systems Ecology, Department of Microbiology, TUM, Germany, www.microbial-systems-ecology.de, contact info: nlee<at>microbial-systems-ecology.de