Quotations Across Time

## **6th Century BCE**

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

**― Li Er (c. 571 - c. 471 BCE ),** *Daodejing*

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star [Polaris], which keeps its place when all the stars are rotating about it.

**― Kong Qiu (551 - 479 BCE ),** *Analects of Confucius*

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

**― Sun Wu (c. 544 - c. 496 BCE),** *The Art of War*

## **5th Century BCE**

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

**― Hippocrates (c. 460 - c. 370 BCE)**

## **3rd Century BCE**

The nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired through training.

**― Xun Kuang (c. 310 – c. 235 BCE),** *Xunzi*

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

**― Han Fei (c. 280 – 233 BCE),** *Han Feizi*

## **13th Century CE**

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.

**― Roger Bacon (c. 1219 – c. 1292),** *The Opus Majus* (1267)

## **17th Century CE**

There is nothing difficult about becoming a sage, and nothing false about transcending the world of appearances.

**― Li Zhi (1527 – 1602),** *Fen Shu* (1590)

## **18th Century CE**

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and non-­being.

**— Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716),** (1702)

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.

*—* **Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804),** *What is Enlightenment?* (1784)

## **19th Century CE**

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

― **Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832),** *Elective Affinities* (1809)

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

― **Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792 - 1856)**

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.

― **Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882),** *Essays Series 2* (1842)

## **20th Century CE**

The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.

― **Felix Adler (1851 – 1933),** *Life and Destiny* (1913)

The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.

― **Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)**

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

― **Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962),** *Essays on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge* (1932-1957)

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

― **Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944),** *The Little Prince* (1943)

The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."

**― Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988),** *The Feynman Lectures on Physics* (1964)

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

― **Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)**

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle.

― **Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996),** *Cosmos* (1980)