Rohit Rai > Rohit's Quotes

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

“And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end.”
― Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”
― V.S. Naipaul

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
― V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.”
― V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.”
― Olaf Stapledon, The Seed and the Flower

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“It is difficult to describe what happened next-except to say that it is a moment that occurs uniquely in the history of refugees. Q tiny bolt of understanding passed between them. The woman recognized my father- not the actual man, whom she had never met, but the form of the man : a boy returning home. In Calcutta- in Berlin, Peshawar, Delhi, Dhaka- men like this seem to turn up everyday, appearing out of nowhere off the streets and walking unannounced into houses, stepping casually over thresholds into their past.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's (Christian) universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.”
― Sam Harris

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

“Most people think, when they're young, that they're going to the top of their chosen world, and that the climb up is only a formality. Without that faith, I suppose, they might never start. Somewhere on the way they lift their eyes to the summit and know they aren't going to reach it; and happiness then is looking down and enjoying the view they've got, not envying the one they haven't.”
― Dick Francis, Reflex