Quotes Flashcards
Knowledge through dialogue
“Vade vade jayate tattvabodhah” - One learns the essence of knowledge through dialogue.
from the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita.
Barnette vs WV Board of Education
- Jehovah’s witnesses refused to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance, alleging it was idolatry.
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” (Justice Robert H. Jackson)
Occam’s razor
William of Occam, English Fransiscan friar and philosopher. d 1347.
Pluralitas non est ponenda, sine necessitate (Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.)
C.S. Lewis on God building a palace
From “Mere Christianity”
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.
Galileo on using our reason
Galileo Galilei
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Constant learning
Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British author)
Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
Believe in the gospel
St. Augustine of Hippo d. 430
If you believe what you like in the gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.
River of time
Ovid, from Metamorpheses
Roman poet, died ~18AD
Nothing in all the world remains unchanged. All things are in a state of flux, all shapes receive a changing nature. Time itself glides on with constant motion, ever as a flowing river. Neither river nor the fleeting hour can stop its constant course. But, as each wave drives on a wave, as each is pressed by that which follows, and must press on that before it, so the moments fly, and others follow, so they are renewed. The moment which moved on before is past, and that which was not, now exists in time, and every moment comes, goes, and is replaced.
