Quotes by Professors - Page 76

A good man shares his knowledge selflessly with everyone.
Eraldo Banovac
Never lie. Firstly, you will be caught in the lie sooner or later. Secondly, count on problems when repairing the consequences of the lie. Therefore, always tell the truth no matter how unpleasant it is.
Eraldo Banovac
Success and failure are relative categories. Therefore, do not exult in victory and do not despair after defeat. Accept the changes in life placidly, knowing that autumn and winter come after summer.
Eraldo Banovac
A lie distorts the image of reality. It is a delusion of the human mind which can disrupt an individual's sense of what is morally right or wrong.
Eraldo Banovac
The development of civilization was marked by constant changes. This will continue – therefore, the future will belong to people ready for change.
Eraldo Banovac
Only a person who is motivated in the inner depths of his being will help without hesitation and with no obligation for the one helped.
Eraldo Banovac
Be patient in life, knowing that there is a real possibility that the desired outcome could happen without your direct involvement.
Eraldo Banovac
In reality, there is no such thing as absolute freedom. The rules of social interaction determine one's freedom.
Eraldo Banovac
A free man does not do what must be done, but what should be done.
Eraldo Banovac
We should enjoy every minute we live today because who knows if we will have a chance to do so tomorrow.
Eraldo Banovac
The people who overcome their fears are the ones who can achieve their dreams.
Eraldo Banovac
True friendship doesn't include jealousy.
Eraldo Banovac
A friend is a person who always understands your preoccupations, even when other people do not perceive them at all.
Eraldo Banovac
Do not look for company at all costs, and especially do not allow loneliness to lead you to fickle love or false friendship.
Eraldo Banovac
Acquiring knowledge through the centuries has influenced human society more than all other factors.
Eraldo Banovac
Superficial people consider themselves capable of doing everything. The question, however, is who is willing to hire them?
Eraldo Banovac
There will come a time when people will realize the greatest mysteries of the universe: will a human then meet anything other than himself?
Eraldo Banovac
In the frame of a known phenomenon of life, a human could be defined as the only proven thinking creature.
Eraldo Banovac
The older the friendship, the stronger the trust.
Eraldo Banovac
Understanding how little we know is crucial to gaining knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.
Alexander McCall Smith
One never knows how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her — is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is the very least question of definitions.
Gregory Maguire
I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.
Alexander Nehamas
The pity of it was that this discovery, if such it was, now seemed so stale, so profitless to me. What good was it? What good did thinking ever do?
Jed Rubenfeld
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
Richard M. Rorty
Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.
Gregory Maguire
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.
Karl R. Popper
He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.
Kenneth W. Harl
You need contradictions to make an ideal.
Alex Shakar
See the moon? It hates us.
Donald Barthelme
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Norman Maclean
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
Norman Maclean
THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Anne Carson
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
Norman Maclean
The world was floods above and fire below
Gregory Maguire
It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.
John Gardner
Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?
Alan Sokal
Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.
B.W. Powe
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
Joyce Carol Oates
Unless we learn to know ourselves, we run the danger of destroying ourselves.
Ja A. Jahannes
Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.
Thomas Nagel
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
Richard M. Rorty
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Karl R. Popper
You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
Gary D. Schmidt
Vengeance is sweet. Vengeance taken when the vengee isn't sure who the venger is, is sweeter still.
Gary D. Schmidt
Bethany blinked. "Did you just hit me?" she asked, disbelief coloring her every feature.Skylar raised both hands, palms outward. "I come in peace!""You do not come in peace. You hit me.""I hit in peace!
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Casey doesn't trust him.""Casey doesn't trust anyone," I replied. "He's paranoid like that. I mean, come on, he's a werewolf who installed a nanny cam in his kids' room." I pointed my spoon at Ali for emphasis. "A nanny cam.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Not going to walk me to the door?" I asked, pretending to be shocked at his lack of gallantry."Of course I am. many would think that a bonny lass such as yerself wouldst be able to stay out of trouble for a distance of fifteen feet, but I know better.""Did you just use the words yerself and wouldst in the same sentence? You can't be a pirate and a courtier at the same time, Dev. It just isn't done.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.
Gina Barreca
If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.
Junot Díaz
Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.
George Saunders
A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Do the kind of things that come from the heart, When you do, you won't be dissatisfied, you won't be envious, you won't be longing for somebody else's things. On the contrary, you'll be overhelmed with what comes back
Morrie Schwartz
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.2.tForgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.3.tDeath ends a life, not a relationship.4.tOnce you learn how to die, you learn how to live.5.tSometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too-even when you are in the dark. Even when you're falling.6.tAs you grow old, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, its also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
Morrie Schwartz
Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.
Christopher Barzak
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
Martin Amis
Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.
Gregory Maguire