A Guide for the Perplexed Quotes

“The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“People say:
'Let the facts speak for themselves'; they forget that the speech of facts is real only if it is heard and understood.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“Faith is not in conflict with reason, nor is it a substitute for reason. Faith chooses the grade of significance or Level of Being at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. There is reasonable faith and there is unreasonable faith. To look for meaning and purpose at the level of inanimate matter would be as unreasonable an act of faith as an attempt to “explain” the masterpieces of human genius as nothing but the outcome of economic interests or sexual frustration.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural selection - proves that the cause of evolution 'was automatic with no room for divine guidance or design'.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

“To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.”
― E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed