The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.
6d ago
We are apt to think that our ideas and feelings are our own, and feel a sort of pride in them; but these we have been long accumulating, borrowing, stealing from the great store of the world's knowledge, and they are really the outcome of thousands of years of thought.
5d ago
6d ago
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
6d ago
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
1w ago
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. The moment you think you have mastered something, you have merely learned enough to see how far you have yet to go.
1w ago
The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things you can have. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It's painful, but it works wonders.
4w ago
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.
1mo ago
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
1mo ago
It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvae that a man gets to know anything about them.
1mo ago
The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things you can have. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It's bad to have an opinion you're proud of if you can't state the other side better than your opponents.
1mo ago
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
2mo ago
But the strangest, most staggering thing in all of this is the instinctual reaction we so-called modern humans have to the dangerous delusions of our ancestors, as though they are fossils in the intellectual evolution of our species. This is strange and staggering because human cognitive capacity has not measurably evolved for many thousands of years, which means that the obtuse ideas of our ancestors sprang from the same brains as our indignant indictment of them. It also means that the egregious delusion with which these eminent "men of science" apprehended and classified the world sprang not from their intellectual capacity but from their cultural conditioning, which in turn means that a great many of the belief — confirmations we take for science today might render us the subject of posterity's indignant indictments.
2mo ago
The best thing for your own mind is to be exposed relentlessly to smart people who disagree with you.
2mo ago
The best way to get smart is to try to be a little smarter than you were the day before. And the way to do that is to recognize how much you don't know.
2mo ago
The notion that science and spirituality are forever at war is the invention of twits who understand neither.
2mo ago
The best way to get smart is to try to be a little smarter than you were the day before—and to do that, you have to know what you don't know.
2mo ago
The best decisions come from understanding what you don't know. Most people spend their time trying to be right about what they think they know, when they should be figuring out what they're wrong about.
2mo ago
The difference between a good business decision and a bad one is often not the decision itself, but whether you had the intellectual humility to reverse it when new information arrived.
3mo ago
The purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it on something solid.
4mo ago
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
4mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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