Aphorisms - Part 1
“The important thing is to not stop questioning.”
-Albert Einstein
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village
garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by
any epaulet I could have worn.”
-Henry David Thoreau
"Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to
wonder at the secrets."
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
-Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
“Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.”
-Chinese Proverb
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
-Aristotle
“We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
-The Talmud
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of
genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-Mozart
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
-Aristotle
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
-Theodosius Dobzhansky
“A hen is only an eggs way of making another egg.”
-Samuel Butler, 1835-1901
“The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for
the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in
life.”
-Max Plank
“An intelligence which at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of the
universe could predict their positions, motions and general affects at any time in the past or
future. So it is that we owe to the weakness of the human mind the science of chance and
probability.”
-Pierre Simon de Laplace
" The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay
“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance
after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic
temper.”
-Aristotle
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
-Plato
“In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior, for it
is a prince's part to pardon.”
-Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies.”
-Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet]
"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"We have art to save ourselves from the truth."
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared
to it.
-Proverbs 8,11
“A steady man proves that fortune is powerless compared to him.”
-Niccolò Macchiavelli
“Fortune can take only what she gave us.”
-Italian proverb
“There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing; It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
-Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet]
“How little we should enjoy life if we never flattered ourselves!”
-La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665
"I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself; that my future lay in
my own hands."
- Darius Ogden Mills
“Narcissim, like selfishness, is an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love.”
-Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their
own.”
-Benjamin Disraeli
The greatest reward lies in making the discovery; recognition can add little or nothing to that.
-Franz Ernst Neumann (1798-1895)
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
“Victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.”
-Count Galeazzo Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 1938
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
-Paul Therouxm, in The Observer
-Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1958
Aphorisms
