
— John Burroughs American naturalist and essayist 1837 - 1921
Quelle: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. X: Religious Truth
The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)
Kontext: Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.
— John Burroughs American naturalist and essayist 1837 - 1921
Quelle: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. X: Religious Truth
— Steven Weinberg American theoretical physicist 1933
page 18, 2nd edition https://books.google.com/books?id=Qd0MEtsBr7oC&pg=PA18
Dreams of a Final Theory (1992; 2nd edition 1994)
— Mark Twain American author and humorist 1835 - 1910
Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 115
— Paul A. Samuelson, buch Foundations of Economic Analysis
Quelle: 1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947, Ch. 1 : Introduction
— Bartolomé de las Casas Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer 1474 - 1566
History of the Indies (1561)
— Albert Einstein, buch Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Es ist das schönste Los einer physikalischen Theorie, wenn sie selbst zur Aufstellung einer umfassenden Theorie den Weg weist, in welcher sie als Grenzfall weiterlebt.
Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (1920) Tr. Robert W. Lawson, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920) pp. 90-91.
1920s
„…In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.“
— Dan Brown, buch Angels & Demons
Quelle: Angels & Demons
„To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.“
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Poet, essayist, physician 1809 - 1894
On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1899); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi 1906 - 1945
translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace
Kontext: The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.
„The search for truth is more precious than its possession.“
— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing writer, philosopher, publicist, and art critic 1729 - 1781
Misattributed
„The search for truth is more precious than its possession.“
— Albert Einstein German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity 1879 - 1955
This quote does appear in Einstein's 1940 essay "The Fundaments of Physics" which can be found in his book Out of My Later Years (1950), but Einstein does not claim credit for it, instead calling it "Lessing's fine saying".
Misattributed
— Tom Robbins American writer 1932
The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Kontext: Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years. According to Hindu cosmology, we're in the Kali Yuga, a dark period when the cow of history is balanced precariously on one leg, soon to topple. Then there are our new-age friends who believe that this December we're in for a global cage-rattling which, once the dust has settled, will usher in a great spiritual awakening.
Most of this apocalyptic noise appears to be just wishful thinking on the part of people who find life too messy and uncertain for comfort, let alone for serenity and mirth. The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending – and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever. Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time.
Otherwise, ours is an old, old story with an interesting new wrinkle. Throughout most of our history, nothing – not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons – has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically. Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.
— Larry Hogan American politician 1956
" Governor-elect Larry Hogan victory speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB6Wn_i7Q8" (4 November 2014).
— Harold Koontz 1909 - 1984
Quelle: "The Management Theory Jungle Revisited," 1980, p. 175 abstract
— Mark Twain American author and humorist 1835 - 1910
Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 393
— Peter Matthiessen, buch The Snow Leopard
The Snow Leopard (1978)
Kontext: The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) — how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called “unspeakable” and “indiscribable,” the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with “the occult” and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .”; Melville referred to “that profound silence, that only voice of God”; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found “more divine than yourself.” And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.
— Lee Smolin American cosmologist 1955
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)
„Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.“
— Molière French playwright and actor 1622 - 1673
Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)
„Agreement with experiment is the sole criteria of truth for a physical theory.“
— Pierre Duhem French physicist, historian of science 1861 - 1916
Notice sur les Titres et Travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem rédigée par lui-même lors de sa candidature à l'Académie des sciences (mai 1913), The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906)