Cons Bulaqueña > Cons's Quotes

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
― Plutarch

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
― Aristotle

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
― Aristotle

“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
― Isaac Newton

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie

“I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“Vulgarity is no substitute for wit”
― Julian Fellowes

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.”
― Ayn Rand

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!”
― Audrey Hepburn

“There is nothing impossible to him who will try.”
― Alexander the Great

“Rule your mind or it will rule you.”
― Horace

“The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.”
― W. Edwards Deming

“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
― Isaac Asimov

“with love one can live even without happiness. Even in sorrow life is sweet; life is sweet, however one lives.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Genius is eternal patience. ”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
― Napoleon Hill