Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Knowledge

Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes.
- Panchatantra

He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.
- Book of Ecclesiastes

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
-Alexander Pope

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
- Thomas Henry Huxley

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people – it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.
- John Keats

Man is not weak, knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanics laughs at strength.
- Samuel Johnson

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.
- Bertrand Russell

To be proud of knowledge is to be blind with light.
- Benjamin Franklin

Learning, the destroyer of arrogance, begets arrogance in fools; even as light, that illuminates the eye, makes owls blind.
- Panchatantra

The utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
- Alfred North Whitehead

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
- John F. Kennedy

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
- Henry Miller

That knowledge that stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.
- Chuang Tzu

The more I read, the more I mediate, and the more I acquire, the more I am enabled to affirm that I know nothing.
- Voltaire

So much has already been written about everything that you can’t find out anything about it.
- James Thurber

Knowledge is a recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
- George Santayana

The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew.
- Milton

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
- Oscar Wilde

The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.
- Vauvenargues

To know is not to prove, nor to explain. It is to accede to vision.
- Saint Exupery

The Eye altering alters all.

- William Blake

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Belief

Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.
- Antonio Machado

Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.
- Ernest Renan

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know.
- Montaigne

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
- Oscar Wilde

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
- Goethe

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd.
- Bertrand Russell

Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding.
- Voltaire

Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
- Thomas Moore

Not Truth, but Faith it is that keeps the world alive.
- Edna Saint Vincent

He’s a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he can’t Perceive,
And he’s a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe.
- William Blake

It is your assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.
- Pascal

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

- William Blake

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Truths

To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
- John Locke

Indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
- John Stuart Mill

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
- Thoreau

Man’s passion for the truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.
- Antonio Machado

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
- Albert Camus

Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
- Thomas Paine

Truth is the child of time.
- John Ford

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.
- Isak Dinesen

Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
- Cyril Connolly

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.
- William Penn

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
- Thomas Henry Huxley

Why do we not hear the truth? Because we do not speak it.
- Publilius Syrus

We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.
- Pascal

To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act, of which the best logics can but babble on the surface.
- Thomas Carlyle

Truth seems to come with its final word; and the final word gives birth to its next.
- Rabindranath Tagore

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
- Albert Camus

Truths may clash without contradicting each other.
- Saint Exupery

Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which in ineluctable.
- Saint Exupery

All necessary truth is its own evidence.
- Emerson

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-Oscar Wilde

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark.
The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.
- Rabindranath Tagore

The truth, my friends, is not eloquent, except unspoken; its vast shadow lends eloquence to our sparks of thought as they die into it.

- George Santayana

Deep truth is imageless.
- Shelley

To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.

- Andre Gide

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Consciousness

The sensitivity of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.
- Pascal

I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger Consciousness
Deliberately face.
- Emily Dickinson

If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
- George Eliot

The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.
- Thomas Moore

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
- Lewis Mumford

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
- James Baldwin

[Man’s] soul longs for beauty, for the absolute, the transcendental. When he attains it, he has no use for it; it oppresses him.
- Maurice Valency

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
- W. H. Auden

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Shelley

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole
And, casting out my self, become a soul.

- Richard Wilbur

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Mind

The mind of men is a mystery; and, like the plant, each one of us naturally appropriates and assimilates that about him which responds to that which is within him.
- Joseph Roux

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone, the mind those of the past and future as well as the present.
- Epicurus

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.
- Vauvenargues

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
- Milton

Mind is a most delicate evidence. Not a soul has seen it yet.
- Richard Eberhart

Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
- Joseph Conrad

Almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
- Keats

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.
- Thoreau

To give reason for fancy were to weigh the fire, and measure the wind.
- John Lyly

The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
- Publilius Syrus

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
- Shelley

In the life of the spirit there are no facts, but only life, as it appears to us in one form or another.

- Luigi Pirandello

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Thought

One thought fills immensity.
- William Blake

Human thought, like God, makes the world in its own image.
- Adam Clayton Powell

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
- Voltaire

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know He is.
- Jean Anouilh

When men make gods, there is no God.
- Eugene O’neill

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
- Herman Melville

Myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths.
-Joseph Campbell

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
- John Locke

The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.

- William Blake

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Theology

The most tedious of all discussions are on the subject of the Supreme Being.
- Emerson

All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic.
- Saint Exupery

Where ignorance is bliss,
‘Tis folly to be wise.
- Thomas Gray

No reason makes it right
To shun accepted ways from stubborn spite;
And we may better join the foolish crowd
Than cling to wisdom, lonely though unbowed.
- Moliere

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.
- Montaigne

He that knows least commonly presumes most.
- Thomas Fuller

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
- Thomas Jefferson

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.
- Publilius Syrus

From ignorance our comfort flows, the only wretched are the wise.
- Matthew Prior

Wisdom is prevented by ignorance, and delusion is the result.
- The Bhagavadgita

The most important part of our lives – our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations – takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
- Joseph Wood Krutch

Our experience is composed rather of illusions lost than of wisdom acquired.
- Joseph Roux

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
- Andre Gide

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
- Marcel Proust

It is the heart that experiences God, and not the reason.
The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.
- Pascal

‘Tis very puzzling on the brink
Of what is called Eternity to stare,
And know no more of what is here, than there.
- Byron

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
- Ivan Turgenev

God is the indwelling, and not the transient cause of all things.
- Spinoza

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Religion

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
- Joseph Conrad

God has delegated himself to a million deputies.
- Emerson

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.
- Stanislaw Lec

How strange it is to see with how much passion
People see things only in their own fashion!
- Moliere

Bigotry is the sacred disease.
- Heraclitus

Conformity is the ape of harmony.
- Emerson

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
- John F. Kennedy

Conformity, humility, acceptance – with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.
- Robert Lindner

Men despise religion, they hate it, and fear it is true.
- Pascal

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.
- Eric Hoffer

We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may
Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites
And private hates with our defense of Heaven.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Solemnity is the shield of idiots.
- Montesquieu

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.
- Henry Ward Beecher

There’s no one so transparent as the person who thinks he’s devilishly deep.
- W. Somerset Maugham

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man’s ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.
- Francois Mauriac

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

- Pascal

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Philosophy

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
- Erich Fromm

What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events?
- Epictetus

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by the solution of them.
- Susanne K. Langer

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.
- Montaigne

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense; but some are greater nonsense than others.
- Samuel Butler

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
- Descartes

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
- Bertrand Russell

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
- Pascal

Every life is its own excuse for being.
- Elbert Hubbard

Being is the great explainer.
- Thoreau

The scholar seeks, the artist finds.
- Andre Gide

Imaginary Discussion Thread on: Gnosis

I will work out the divinity that is busy within my mind
And tend the means that are mine.
- Pindar

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
- Emerson

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
- Thomas Carlyle

Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone.
- Andre Gide

The high strength of men
knows no content with limitation.
- Aeschylus

This is courage in a man:
To bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.
- Euripides

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget,
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our will,
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
- Aeschylus