Echoes

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. We too should so blend whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, that it may be all the clearer for being drawn from many sources; and then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

Example is the best lesson there is.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence of those men's wits, that have received and held it to be true, and with the sprightliness of their judgments offered such violence to their own senses, as that they have been able to prefer that which their reason dictated to them, to that which sensible experiments represented most manifestly to the contrary. ...I cannot find any bounds for my admiration, how that reason was able in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity.

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models.

In the first place he made short work of what I have called my 'chronological snobbery,' the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also 'a period,' and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.