Paul Oppenheimer > Paul's Quotes

“There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”
― Robert Frost

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”
― Jean Genet

“The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

“In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.”
― Richard Powers

“I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Here

“Very like leaves upon this earth are the generations of men—old leaves, cast on the ground by wind, young leaves the greening forest bears when spring comes in. So mortals pass; one generation flowers even as another dies away.”
― Homer

“People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.”
― Bernard Williams

“No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.”
― Hilary Putnam

“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
― E.O. Wilson