#edge

When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough. ↗

— Criss Jami

#approval #authority #blanket #brute-force #brutes

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#knowledge #orgone #pride #projection #self-knowledge

He who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out. ↗

— William Blake

#knowledge #science #science

We understand more than we know. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#science #understanding #wisdom #science

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. ↗

— Jules Verne

#facts #knowledge #science #scientific-method #truth

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#knowledge #science #wisdom #science

...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge. ↗

— David Brin

#questions #religion #science #scientists #religion

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#nature #nature

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting. ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#interesting #personality #self-knowledge #different

The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#science #science