Set - Quotes
A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.
From the moment we are born we are presented with absolute facts rather than situated ones. We aren`t taught that distinctions such as young and old or healthy and unhealthy are social constructions and that their meaning depends on context. We are conditioned to learn about and see the world as a set of facts, such as 1 + 1 = 2. The world is far more subtle than such facts allow, and we should have learned that 1 + 1=2 only if we are using the base 10 number system, but that it equals 10 if the number system is base 2, and that 1 + 1 = 1 if we are adding one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum.
If determinism is true, the future is set - and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism - quantum or otherwise - we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.
Most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.
Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.
There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don`t respect the other person, you`re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don`t know how to compromise, you`re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can`t talk openly about what goes on between you, you`re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don`t have a common set of values in life, you`re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but a search for them.
Data without generalizations are useless; facts without explanatory principles are meaningless. A "theory" is not just someone's opinion or a wild guess made by some scientist. A theory is a well-supported and well-tested generalization that explains a set of observations. Science without theory is useless.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Lord, set my heart afire with faith, because I am losing faith. Lord, touch my heart, and set it afire.
Give a man a fire and he`s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he`s warm for the rest of his life.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.