“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories
“Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think, must frequently suffer from ennui. It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, and to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised on it, by credulity.”
James Boswell, Esq. The Journal of a Tour To Corsica; & Memoirs of Pascal Paoli
“Trends that have held up over several hundred years are not apt to reverse themselves within the next several weeks.”
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
Will Durant, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
“history teaches, as no other subject can, the sad fact that acts have consequences.”
Robin Neillands, The Wars of the Roses
“let them choose rather to be corrected by the wise than to be lauded by the foolish.”
St. Augustine City of God
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (according to https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/194459.Maim_nides)
“One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton