REFLECTIONS

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience.
And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science
has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of
being true.
-- Carl Sagan

Here is a translated quote found in a
Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, courtesy of Robert Fulghum--

"There is really nothing you must be,
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.
However, it helps to understand that fire burns,
and when it rains, the earth gets wet. . . . ."

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things
in rationality.
-- Bertrand Russell, "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.
-- Aristotle

"The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be
organized
or regulated. It isn't true that everybody should follow one path.
Listen to
your own truth." - Ram Dass

"A scientist is a man who changes his beliefs according to reality, a
theist
is a man who changes reality to match his beliefs." --Volker Braun
(1998)

"When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an Atheist, a Theist, or a Pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis," - had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble."

Thomas Henry Huxley

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more
interesting than sex.
-- Aldous Huxley

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to
be taken too seriously.
-- Nicholas Butler

Where facts are few, experts are many.
-- Donald R. Gannon

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is
inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
-- Eric Hoffer

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign
to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your
opponent is the ignorant one-until you can show it isn't you. - M.N. Plano

Nothing is lost; the universe is honest,
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.
[Elder Olson — Great Occasions, edited by Carl Seaburg, Beacon Press, 1968, p. 388]

"The human race divides itself politically
into those who want to be controlled,
and those who have no such desire."
-- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)

I look forward to a great future for America -- a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
-- John F. Kennedy

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who
dares not is a slave.
-- Sir William Drummond

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as
revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of
reverence
and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a
religion will emerge.
- Carl Sagan

Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
-- Italian Proverb

"I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me
longer than usual to find my robe. "
-- Woody Allen

"Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you
can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do
something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical
moment in the history of our planet." -- Carl Sagan

THERE ARE SEVEN SINS: Wealth without work, Pleasure without
conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, And politics
without principle."
- Mahatma Gandhi

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there
are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence,
transform a yellow spot into the sun.
-- Pablo Picasso