If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.

Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am -- I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true: I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind, understanding, or reason, -- terms whose signification was before unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existent; but what thing? The answer was, a thinking thing. The question now arises, am I aught besides? I will stimulate my imagination with a view to discover whether I am not still something more than a thinking being. Now it is plain I am not the assemblage of members called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air diffused through all these members, or wind, or flame, or vapour, or breath, or any of all the things I can imagine; for I supposed that all these were not, and, without changing the supposition, I find that I still feel assured of my existence.

Rene Descartes, The Nature of th

Evils draw men together.

Aristotle

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

Pearl Buck

To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw new mischief on.

William Shakespeare

It is not where we are that matters nor what we have, it is what we do with where we are and what we have.

Sonia Rumzi

Your self image is your pattern!. Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs to a pattern. You identify with your pattern or thought. Your patterns leads your life.

J. G. Gallimore

I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.

James Herriot

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

Herman Melville

Hunger is the best pickle.

Benjamin Franklin

In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled. The question it poses, of universal and orderly materialism, is the most important that can be asked in philosophy and religion.

Edward O. Wilson