Being True Quotes - Page 31

• A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. "Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?'
  'Of course not,' replied Bohr, 'but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.'

  Niels Bohr

  Country, Wall, Believe

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• It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.

  Dan Millman

  Life, May, Action

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• I will obey my soul and be true to that within me which is highest.

  Wallace D. Wattles

  Soul, My Soul, Highest

  Wallace D. Wattles (2013). “The Selected Teachings of Wallace D. Wattles”, p.191, Simon and Schuster

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• [Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar astronomy and atomic physics are the only sciences which stand higher in popular estimation.

  G. H. Hardy

  Triumph, May, Study

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• I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “nigh -walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer imiverse, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder.

  Carl Sagan

  Wine, Science, Night

  "Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science".

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• First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

  William James

  Science, Discovery, Important

  Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 6 (1907)

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• The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification-the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

  Karl Popper

  Art, Science, Simple

  Karl Popper (2012). “The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.44, Routledge

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• In the history of physics, there have been three great revolutions in thought that first seemed absurd yet proved to be true. The first proposed that the earth, instead of being stationary, was moving around at a great and variable speed in a universe that is much bigger than it appears to our immediate perception. That proposal, I believe, was first made by Aristarchos two millenia ago ... Remarkably enough, the name Aristarchos in Greek means best beginning.

  Edward Teller

  Believe, Moving, Mean

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• It's very easy to say that something is a shadow of itself, and it may be true in some senses.

  Sydney Schanberg

  Shadow, May, Easy

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• If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

  Dan Barker

  Religion, Atheism, Admitting

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• Finding that no religion was based upon facts, but that all of them were in opposition to facts, and could not therefore be true, I began to reflect upon what must be the condition of mankind, trained from infancy to believe in these errors, and to make them the rule of their conduct.

  Robert Owen

  Believe, Errors, Religion

  "Debate on the Evidences of Christianity".

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• I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. That's when we're going to fight... There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher 'that might not necessarily be true.' That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Religious, Fear, Teaching

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.

  Dan Barker

  Fear, Opposites, Safety

  Dan Barker (1992). “Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist”, Freedom from Religion Fndtn

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• Give up all forms of parrotry. Start practicing whatever you truly feel to be true and justly to be just. Do not make a show of your faith and beliefs. You have not to give up your religion, but to give up clinging to the husk of mere ritual and ceremony. To get to the fundamental core of Truth underlying all religions, reach beyond religion.

  Meher Baba

  Giving Up, Diversity, Fundamentals

  "The Everything and the Nothing". Book by Meher Baba, 1963.

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• Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Faith, Letting Go, Liars

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• We may not know when or how the Lord's answers will be given, but in His time and His way, I testify, His answers will come. For some answers we may have to wait until the hereafter. This may be true for some promises in our patriarchal blessings and for some blessings for family members. Let us not give up on the Lord. His blessings are eternal, not temporary.

  Robert D. Hales

  Giving Up, Blessing, Waiting

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• You may build castles in the air, and fume, and fret, and grow thin and lean, and pale and ugly, if you please. But I tell you, no man worth having is true to his wife, or can be true to his wife, or ever was, or will be so.

  John Vanbrugh

  Men, Air, Wife

  William. II Congreve William Wycherley (John Vanbrugh and Farquhar George), William. II Wycherley, William Congreve, George Farquhar, John Vanbrugh (1840). “Dramatic Works with Biographical and Critical Notices by Leigh Hunt. - London, Moxon 1840”, p.317

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• We need never refrain from asking anything of God simply on the ground that we think it impossible. God specializes in "impossible" things that are too good to be true.

  Carroll Eugene Simcox

  Thinking, Impossible Things, Religion

  Carroll Eugene Simcox (1985). “Prayer: The Divine Dialog”, Intervarsity Pr

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• To be true to one's self is the ultimate test in life. To have courage and the sensitivity to follow your hidden dreams and stand tall against the odds that are bound to fall in your path. Life is too short and precious to be dealt with in any other fashion. This thought I hold dear to my heart and I always try to be true to myself and others that I encounter along the way.

  Flo Hyman

  Dream, Volleyball, Fashion

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• During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical. The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow from it, if it be true

  Augustus De Morgan

  Knowledge, Science, Two

  Augustus De Morgan (1872). “A Budget of Paradoxes Reprinted, with the Author's Additions, from the Athenaeum Augustus De Morgan”, p.2

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• What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

  Harold Jeffreys

  Science, Use, Levels

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• Honesty is the foundation of a sound character and the keystone of all other virtues. It is the cement without which all other redeeming features are fractured and without anchor. A dishonest person may be kind, witty, and very capable, but the strength of character simply isn't there. Honesty does not come by degrees. A person is either all honest or he is dishonest. You can be true or you can be false, but you can't be both at the same time.

  William Grant Bangerter

  Witty, Honesty, Character

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• There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

  A.J. Ayer

  Rivals, Tests, Claims

  "Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" by A.J. Ayer, (p. 133), 1982.

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• For if as scientists we seek simplicity, then obviously we try the simplest surviving theory first, and retreat from it only when it proves false. Not this course, but any other, requires explanation. If you want to go somewhere quickly, and several alternate routes are equally likely to be open, no one asks why you take the shortest. The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is the most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.

  Nelson Goodman

  Science, Simplicity, Trying

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• As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

  Hannah Arendt

  Integrity, Hypocrite, Evil

  'On Revolution' (1963) ch. 2

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