The Intellectual Devotional Biographies Quotes

“Belief in reincarnation was the central tenet of the Pythagorean religion. Pythagoras taught that the soul was indestructible, but that people needed to follow certain rules to ensure the best possible reincarnations after their physical deaths. Among the rules adopted by his followers: no wearing shoes in the temple, no touching white roosters, put the right shoe on first, and always abstain from eating beans.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Jesus did not consider his teachings to be a religion separate from Judaism; the gradual separation of Christianity into a distinct faith occurred decades after his death.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“In 2003, Gorbachev won a Grammy award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for a version of Peter and the Wolf, by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953).”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“As a nine-year-old, Pauling was such a voracious reader that his father wrote a letter to the Portland Oregonian asking for book recommendations for his son. “Please don’t suggest the Bible and Darwin’s The Origin of Species,” the elder Pauling wrote, “because he’s already read these books.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“To blacks, he was proof that a former slave could succeed. To many whites, on the other hand, his nonconfrontational attitude was a model for how to be a “good” black.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Combining the French passions for snails and beheadings, Lavoisier conducted a series of experiments in 1768 that proved that certain species of snails would regrow their heads after they were chopped off.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Do not fly a kite in a thunderstorm. Several imitators, under the impression that Franklin had safely carried out the test as described in his paper, have been electrocuted trying to replicate his experiment.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“At the time, most Europeans believed that religious conformity was necessary to safeguard civil order, and they questioned how such a diverse colony could survive.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Robespierre was unmoved by the mayhem he unleashed. “Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice” he once declared.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“But it would take the English more than fifty years to subdue Scotland. According to legend, Wallace’s animosity toward the English was sparked by an incident in which several invading soldiers tried to steal fish he had caught.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Zhang’s seismometer—Houfeng Didong Yi, or the “instrument for inquiring into the wind and the shaking of the earth”—was reconstructed by a Chinese museum in 2005. The device used a pendulum in the middle of an urn that was lined with eight dragons, each pointing outward in a different direction. When the machine detected a quake, the pendulum dislodged a bronze ball that then dropped out of the mouth of one of the dragons and into the mouth of a metal toad—indicating the direction of the earthquake’s epicenter.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities

“Why didn’t the chicken cross the road? According to the ancient philosopher and logician Zeno of Elea (c. 495–c. 430 BC), the bird simply found it impossible to get to the other side.”
― David S. Kidder, The Intellectual Devotional: Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World's Greatest Personalities