Ali > Ali's Quotes

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.”
― Stephen Hawking

“The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
― Alice Walker

“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
― Socrates

“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”
― Michel Legrand

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!”
― Monique Rockliffe

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The highest result of education is tolerance”
― Helen Keller

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“In order to have faith in his own path, he does not need to prove that someone else's path is wrong.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

“Never judge someone
By the way he looks
Or a book by the way it's covered;
For inside those tattered pages,
There's a lot to be discovered”
― Stephen Cosgrove

“One's enemy is often the best teacher of tolerance.”
― Colleen Houck, Tiger's Quest

“I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Man In The Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt

“A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false.”
― Benjamin Franklin, A Benjamin Franklin Reader: The Essential Writings of a Colonial Sage

“The most unpresentable persons are generally the most interesting.”
― Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca

“If you accept others as equals, you embrace them unconditionally, now and forever. But if you let them know that you tolerate them, you suggest in the same breath that they are actually an inconvenience, like a nagging pain or an unpleasant odour you are willing to disregard.”
― Arthur Japin, In Lucia's Eyes

“Always hear others out and remain open-minded; the day you think you know everything is the day you have the most yet to learn.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

“It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.”
― Bede Griffiths

“What you reject today, you could accept tomorrow. And what you accept today, you could reject tomorrow. Never say never unless you can predict the future.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“It is obvious that the concept of truth has become suspect. Of course it is correct that is has been much abused. Intolerance and cruelty have occurred in the name of truth. To that extent people are afraid when someone says, "This is the truth", or even "I have the truth". We never have it, at best is has us. No one will dispute that one must be careful and cautious in claiming the truth. But simply to dismiss it as unattainable is really destructive.
(...) We must have the courage to dare to say: Yes, man must seek the truth; he is capable of truth. It goes without saying that truth requires criteria for verification and falsification. It must always be accompanied by tolerance, also. But then truth also points out to us those constant values which have made mankind great. That is why the humility to recognize the truth and to accept it as a standard has to be relearned and practiced again.
The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power; this is the central theme of John's Gospel: When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that he himself is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with legions but rather makes it visible through his Passion and thereby also implements it.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times - A Conversation with Peter Seewald

“God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“Empathy is the door to wisdom.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem