Facts Quotes - Page 21

• Now we will no longer concede so easily that anyone has the truth; the rigorous methods of inquiry have spread sufficient distrust and caution, so that we experience every man who represents opinions violently in word and deed as any enemy of our present culture, or at least as a backward person. And in fact, the fervor about having the truth counts very little today in relation to that other fervor, more gentle and silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of learning afresh and testing anew.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Enemy, Culture

  "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, transl. by Helen Zimmern, Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself"/ aphorism 633, 1909-1913.

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• Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Philosophy, Inspiration

  "Beyond Good and Evil". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5., 1886.

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• Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

  Willa Cather

  Drama, Emotional, Giving

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.50, U of Nebraska Press

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• Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Passion, Reality

  Aldous Huxley (2017). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals”, p.153, Routledge

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• Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

  Aldous Huxley

  Taste, Mass, Interest

  Aldous Huxley (2008). “Brave New World Revisited”, p.57, Random House

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• Addiction is not a fact of life but a description about how we are choosing to live.

  Paul Pearsall

  Addiction, Description, Choosing To Live

  Paul Pearsall (2009). “Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, be a Good Blamer and Throttle Your Inner Child”, p.45, Basic Books

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• A practical, matter-of-fact man is like a wagon without springs: every single pebble on the road jolts him; but a man with imagination has springs that break the jar and jolt.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Spring, Men, Imagination

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

  Cesare Pavese

  Art, Strong, Sex

  Cesare Pavese (2017). “This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950”, p.286, Routledge

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• My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Fall, Rocks, Wife

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2000). “The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.69, Cambridge University Press

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• Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.

  Learned Hand

  Passion, Men, Law

  Learned Hand (1968). “The art and craft of judging: the decisions of Judge Learned Hand”

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• It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.

  Learned Hand

  Kind, Legislation, Court

  Letter to Louis D. Brandeis, January 22, 1919.

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• The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mean, Way, Someday

  Richard P. Feynman (2009). “The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist”, p.24, Hachette UK

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• In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Engineering, Two, Mind

  "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Physics textbook by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands, volume I; lecture 44, "The Laws of Thermodynamics"; section 44-1, "Heat engines; the first law"; p. 44-2, 1964.

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• When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Mother, Believe, Book

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• The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies - easily checkable, blatant lies - and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men - 15 of them are Saudis - and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq - how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Country, Lying, Ignorance

  "Ruminator" Magazine, August/September 2005.

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• [Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Children, Animal, Talking

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• You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

  Ernest Renan

  Suffering, Comfort, May

  "Ernest Renan: a Critical Biography". Book by H. W. Wardman, 1964.

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• Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another.

  John Dewey

  Spring, War, Class

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.82, Courier Corporation

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• It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies... which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.

  John Dewey

  Philosophy, Men, Class

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.121, 谷月社

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• The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.

  John Dewey

  Home, School, Ideas

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Sidney Hook (2008). “The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924, Volume 9: 1916, Democracy and Education”, p.244, SIU Press

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• A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

  John Dewey

  Progress, Important, Use

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.37, 谷月社

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• But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Mean, Taught Us

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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• The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Philosophy, Would Be

  "Democracy and Education". Book by John Dewey, 1916.

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• The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

  Erich Fromm

  Real, Mistake, Hands

  "Psychoanalyse und Soziologie". "Critical Theory and Society : A Reader" by S. E. Bronner, 1989.

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• Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Differences, Humanity

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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