Gauranga Baishya > Gauranga's Quotes

“Why settle for smaller things, when God has greater things for you?”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well. Remark”
― Albert Einstein, Quotable Einstein: An A to Z Glossary of Quotations

“For example, as Selye seems to suggest, we cannot control anyone’s reactions but our own. Therefore, we shouldn’t work to please others or to gain their approval; we must, instead, set our own goals and work to satisfy those.”
― Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through: My Life in Science

“Each of those obstacles would always be more tangible than contributions I hadn’t yet made. Obstacles have shape and structure; you can see them. One’s future impact, by contrast, remains invisible, hypothetical, at least until the future finally arrives.”
― Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through: My Life in Science

“And of all my early lessons that prepared me to be a scientist, that one, I think, is the most important of all: that work and”
― Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through: My Life in Science

“But even as a young child, I understood something critical: What I lacked in natural ability, I could make up for in effort. I could work harder, put in more hours, do more, and do it with greater care.”
― Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through: My Life in Science

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“No emotional attachment, no friendliness, never getting close enough for it to feel like betrayal.”
― Lauren Price, Behind Frenemy Lines

“Detachment is being apathetic or aloof to other people, while un-attachment is acknowledging and honoring other people, while choosing not to let them influence your emotional well being. Detached would mean I do not care, while un-attached means I care, although I am not going to alter my emotional state due to your emotions, words, or actions.”
― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them. And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.

The delusion of the joys of life that had formerly stifled my fear of the dragon no longer deceived me. No matter how many times I am told: you cannot understand the meaning of life, do not thinking about it but live, I cannot do so because I have already done it for too long. Now I cannot help seeing day and night chasing me and leading me to my death. This is all I can see because it is the only truth. All the rest is a lie.

Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art – I no longer found sweet.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

“So the universe is very, very, very, very, very big. And it makes our heads spin. I was looking up at the sky one night when I was about ten years old. And I felt like my life didn’t matter. And I guess it was converting large space to large time. One star after another star after another star and wondering whether that would keep going forever.

“I had this sense that the universe existed a long time before I was born, and it would exist a long time after I was dead. And I was just a speck that didn’t matter. I don’t matter. My parents don’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re all just specks. We’re just living in this brief moment.

“None of us were here a million years ago. None of us will be here a million years from now. And the universe doesn’t care. It just goes on and on and on. So, why are we wasting time, you know, going to school, having dentist appointments? All of that.

“Why are we wasting our time? Because none of it matters. And then I fell in love. And that changed everything. That mattered. Even though we might both be specks in the cosmos.”
― Alan Lightman

“But does the danger really lie in the lack of universality? Doesn't it rather lurk in the pretense of totality? What is dangerous is the attempt of a man who is an expert, say, in the field of biology, to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of biology. The same is true of psychology and sociology as well. At the moment at which totality is claimed, biology becomes biologism, psychology becomes psychologism, and sociology becomes sociologism. In other words, at that moment science is turned into ideology. What we have to deplore, I would say, is not that scientists are specializing, but that the specialists are generalizing. We are familiar with that type called terrible simplificateurs. Now we become acquainted with a type I would like to call terrible generalisateurs. I mean those who cannot resist the temptation to make overgeneralized statements on the grounds of limited findings.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy

“A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning