In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

It’s amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can’t solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

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?

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

I believe there are no questions that science can’t answer about a physical universe.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

We as women, we have to understand that we know more, just even instinctively, than we think we do.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.