Things to Ponder . . .

We know what we are, but know not what we may be. --William Shakespeare

A concept is stronger than a fact. --Charlotte P. Gillman

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. --Mark Twain

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. --Chinese Proverb

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or any other ultimate fact of nature.
– Thomas Huxley

Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness
of its being. – Jean-Paul Sartre

The 'dirty secret of contemporary neuroscience': we have no idea what the correct level of analysis is, because there is no universally accepted theory of how the brain codes information. – John Searle

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. --Ambrose Bierce

The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance. --Confucius

All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price. –Juvenal

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. --Oscar Wilde

It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A theory must be tempered with reality. --Jawaharlal Nehru

Do not ask me who I am and do not expect me to remain the same. Leave it to the bureaucrats to see that our papers are in order. --Michel Foucault

The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and . . . there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. --Alan Watts

Today, it is the speaking subject who declared God dead one hundred years ago whose very existence is now being called into question. --Paul Kugler

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. --Francis Crick

Fifty years from now we may have drugs that can alter personality profiles. Things are moving very fast.
--Jerome Kagan

The American achievement is not the multicultural society, it is the multicultural individual. . . . Identity is the promise of singleness, but this is a false promise. Many things are possible in America, but the singleness of identity is not one of them. --Leon Wieseltier

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death. --Ludwig Börne

We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell. --Plato

All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the deity housed in our bodies. --Flavius Josephus

A human being is an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. --Christopher Morley

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies. --Frank Gelett Burgess

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. --Albert Camus

I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow. --Woodrow Wilson

I have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. -- Mark Twain

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests. -- Albert Jay Nock

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

-- Blaise Pascal

You can't say civilization isn't advancing: in every war, they kill you in a new way. --Will Rogers

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. --Ralph Waldo EmersonI

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

--G. C. Lichtenberg

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience. --Julian Sorrell Huxley

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve. --James A. Froude