Robert Zwilling > Robert's Quotes

“Civilization is the encouragement of differences.”
― Gandhi

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
― Frederik Pohl

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong...For What It’s Worth”
― Stephen Stills

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”
― Carl Sagan

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” 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.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it”
― Lao Tzu

“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot”
― Bruce Lee

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Whatever it is, I'm against it.”
― Groucho Marx

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

“May your feet ever walk in the light of two suns... and may the moonshadow never fall on you... ”
― Robert Fanney

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ”
― Nikola Tesla

“What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.”
― Nikola Tesla

“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome." John Steinback”
― Ken Doggett

“You see, but you do not observe.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia

“Technology is the knack of arranging the world in such a way that you don't have to experience it.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about "a new Silas Weekly" or "a new Lavinia Fitch" exactly as they talked about "a new brick" or "a new hairbrush." They never said "a new book by" whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi