I have listed here the names of some of the people whose work has informed, excited, challenged, sometimes baffled and often inspired me. Some are scientists while others are philosophers, artists, therapists and poets. The significance or meaningfulness of the work lies in the meanings expressed and the significance to me.
- Useful links
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
PlatoWisdom begins in wonder
SocratesThe further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Albert Einstein
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572-1631)
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the…
Plato (427 BC - 347 BC), The Republic
“In my early professionals years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
Carl Rogers (1902-1987)Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677)Generally speaking, the first non-violent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him. At every step in the non-violent struggle, at every level we try tirelessly to establish a dialogue, or re-establish it if it has broken down. When I say ‘the other side,’ that could be a group of pers…
Hildegard Goos-Mayr. (b. 1930 - )You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)Hamlet: To me [Denmark] is a prison. Rosencrantz: Why then your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind. Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams. Guildenstern: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Shakespeare - HamletThe real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)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…
Albert EinsteinExperience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)This passion of our kind For the process of finding out Is a fact one can hardly doubt, But I would rejoice in it more If I knew more clearly what We wanted the knowledge for, Felt certain still that the mind Is free to know or not.
W H AudenWhen you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
Alfred Whitehead (1861 - 1947)
“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”
Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984), French philosopher,social theorist and historian of ideasIn the business world, the rear view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
Warren Buffett (1930 - )
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
