Learned Person Quotes (page 8)
Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.
B. F. Skinner
The most important and most significant good quality in our human life is gratitude. Unfortunately, that good quality we somehow manage not to express either in our thoughts or in our actions. Right from the beginning of our life, we have somehow learned not to express it. So we have the least amount of the very thing that we need most in order to become a better person.
Sri Chinmoy
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
Elizabeth Gilbert
You’ve got to get cold to get warm,” Phoebe said.
Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It’s true with money and love, too. You’ve got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go...
Nicholson Baker
The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern - if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed...
Carl Sagan
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Philip Zimbardo
A: Funny about my mother. All my life, from the time I was just a little kid, I thought of her as a sad person. I mean, the way some people are tall or fat or skinny. My father always seemed the stronger one. As if he was a bright color and she was a faded color. I know it sounds crazy. T: Not at all. A: But later, when I learned the truth about our lives, I found she was still sad. But strong, too. Not faded at all. It wasn't sadness so much as fear--the Never Knows.
Robert Cormier
what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.
Madeleine L'Engle
Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exercise of principle would always require more from her than from persons nurtured in it, for she had learned it by application of will. Caro would never do the right thing without knowing it, as some could.
Shirley Hazzard
For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.
Karl Popper