The quote database

Men of the best intentions and soundest views may differ in their construction of some parts of the Constitution, but there are others on which dispassionate reflection can leave no doubt.

Hence the necessity that he should have been well trained in habits, who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and moral philosophy generally.

You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.

Although our intellect always feels itself urged towards clearness and certainty, still our mind often feels itself attracted by uncertainty.

Our knowledge of circumstances has increased, but our uncertainty, instead of having diminished, has only increased.

It’s also about knowing what you know and what you don’t know. It’s about being open to people and ideas.

It is as impossible in a book to teach a person in charge of sick how to manage, as it is to teach her how to nurse.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

Look back on these forebodings, not hastily but reluctantly made, and see how in every instance they have completely failed.

They may be truths to me, but don’t think that that makes them mine… because you can’t own a truth.

A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market