Wise Words

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it:
For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than the arguments of its opposers.
-William Penn

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
-Immanuel Kant

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
-Albert Einstein

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
-C.S. Lewis

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave inrrationally in the name of reason.
-Ashley Montagu

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, and the children of men, as a whole, do not experience it... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-Helen Keller

The sense of duty is the fountain of human rights. In other words, the same principle which teaches the former bears witness to the latter. Duties and rights must stand and fall together.
-William Ellery Channing

Spend 10 billion on the welfare of others, not on warfare against others.
-from Dave Traxson

A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

-Returning violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars...
Hate cannot drive out hate:
only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable...In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous.
-Dalai Lama

Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.
-Nelson Mandela

One of the ironies of human worldviews is that ‘law and order’ individuals who reject civil disobedience often in the end accept violent war and rebellion;
in contrast ‘civil disobedient’ individuals who break unjust laws as wrong and believe in nonviolent resistance usually reject violence, war, and rebellion.

One would think that 'law and order' individuals would oppose war, especially the slaughter of civilians, but historically that hasn't been the case.

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
-Thomas Jefferson

What you commit yourself to be will change what you are and make you into a completely different person. Let me repeat that.

Not the past but the future conditions you, because what you commit yourself to become determines what you are – more than anything that ever happened to you yesterday or the day before.
-Dr. Anthony Campolo

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
-W C Bryan

To be educated means to have the ability to be aware of yourself and your worldview, and thereby be able to make corrections when you are wrong; then you will be lead to new insights.
-Lit Insight

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
-Paul Tillich

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
-H.L. Mencken

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all does better.
-Daniel C. Dennett

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
-Alfred North Whitehead

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

The power of God is the worship He inspires....The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
-Alfred North Whitehead

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
-Gandhi



True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
-Alfred North Whitehead

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw

The artistic representation of history is a more scientific and serious pursuit than the exact writing of history. For the art of letters goes to the heart of things, whereas the factual report merely collocates details.
-Aristotle

There are sports stars who make 10 times the annual salary of the President. They are national heroes. Why, exactly? There is something here transcending the diversity of political, social, and economic systems. Something ancient is calling.
-Carl Sagan

The hero is an individual who gets up when one can't.
-Anon

Why listen to the pithy maxims and aphorisms of various thinkers?


As the Teacher said 2,500 years ago:
12 "...be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body."

11 Sayings from the wise are like cattle prods and...well-driven nails."
-Ecclesiastes 12:12 and 11, Hebrew Bible

I actually like endless books--both the writing of them, and the reading of them; and the studying of them and the reflecting on them, and then the meditating on them, but
there is a grain of insight in what the teacher said, especially when like him, one becomes discouraged.

Wise phrases can inspire hope.

Pointed statements do break through our daily rituals, cognitive biases, and tendency toward ethnocentricism.

In the Light of Reason, Truth, and Justice,

Daniel Wilcox