Quotes by Professors - Page 70

Don't be afraid to study hard: knowledge never exhausts the mind.
Eraldo Banovac
Only knowledge and truth may result in freedom of mind.
Eraldo Banovac
A deep consideration of the essence of knowledge should reveal how knowledge corresponds to the truth.
Eraldo Banovac
A man's vanity often goes hand in hand with his lack of knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
The dynamic nature of knowledge is reflected in human progress and technological achievements.
Eraldo Banovac
Those who have no knowledge are often willing to occupy influential positions with the aim of acquiring every possible benefit.
Eraldo Banovac
Superficial knowledge is potentially more dangerous than ignorance. It gives a false sense of security encouraging an ignorant man to persevere in his efforts that can result in huge damage.
Eraldo Banovac
If you cannot solve a problem, ask someone who knows.
Eraldo Banovac
Acquiring knowledge is the most fruitful effort.
Eraldo Banovac
Each type of knowledge has value; however, from an engineering point of view, practical knowledge seems to be more valuable than theoretical knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
Knowledge can be acquired by education, reading, communicating and observing, but also simply by living.
Eraldo Banovac
The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.
Jordan B Peterson
I've tried to solve problems to the best of my knowledge. Many times I was successful, but sometimes I also failed. And now I finally understand – that's life.
Eraldo Banovac
Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.
Andrew J. Bacevich
A wise man is humble, knowing he actually doesn't know much.
Eraldo Banovac
Openness to change is key to implementing new knowledge. That is why one who is indifferent to change is not a friend of knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
In general, sharing and using things decreases their value. However, knowledge increases by implementation and especially by sharing among people.
Eraldo Banovac
There is a huge difference between thinking we know something and actually knowing something.
Eraldo Banovac
In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act.
Lynn Hoffman
Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)
Alan Sokal
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
Anne Carson
Of course. You get everything from books.
Gregory Maguire
What we most love is not what we know, but what knows us and draws us. . . . (78)
Ravi Ravindra
I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.
John Gardner
I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.
Randy Pausch
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Edward Said
And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him. And I nibbled on my crust of bread. Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.
Ellie Wiesel
Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.
Alexander McCall Smith
Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.
Stephen R. Prothero
If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.
Stephen R. Prothero
Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.
Stephen R. Prothero
Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.
Stephen R. Prothero
We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.
David Watson
Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
Gregory Maguire
The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Belief is otiose reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
Martin Amis
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Martin Amis
[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
Bart D. Ehrman
Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
Stephen R. Prothero
....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.
Craig Werner
One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.
Stephen R. Prothero
On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war.
Stephen R. Prothero
A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake.
Elie Wiesel
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.
Chinua Achebe
It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances.
Sheldon Vanauken
Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.
Merlin Stone
The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
Donald Barthelme
Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults.
Merlin Stone
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
Bart D. Ehrman
Death was a lens that would reveal things as they really were: what was important would assume its true importance what was unimportant would recede into the shadows.
Robert Hellenga
Je suis content que tu aies trouvé ton livre, Steve. Tout le monde y arrive, un jour ou l'autre. Il faut parfois en lire dix, cent ou mille, mais on finit toujours par le dénicher. Enfin, presque toujours. Certains abandonnent avant de l'avoir trouvé, malheureusement...
François Gravel
I feel like a millionaire on the back of an armored jet-ski my samurai girlfriend who loves me is charging at a cartel speedboat to win a game of chicken. Isn’t this the day’s best part? You don’t even have to remember to enjoy it. It enjoys you into itself.
Adam Levin
The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.
Toni Morrison
There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.
Frances Mayes
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
La luz del pasillo iluminaba débilmente mi rostro que se reflejaba de modo fantasmal en el cristal de la ventanilla y me hacía recordar el que tuve en la infancia, el que naufragó para siempre en la despedida, como si aquel niño se hallara agazapado en algún lugar de mi interior esperando un descuido mío para emerger de nuevo en las aguas fangosas del pasado con su sonrisa feliz y sus ojos brillantes.
Elia Barceló
I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.
Toni Morrison
The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.
John R. Stilgoe
Još uvijek silno vjerujem u umjetnost kao medikament!
Jasna Horvat