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"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."
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"For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize."

"On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it."

"We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning "punctuated evolution and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication."

"Use 'Why?' to help you follow the breadcrumbs back to the source of the problem."

"On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. ... In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be. ~ 14th Dalai Lama in his talk to the Society for Neuroscience in 2005 in Washington."

"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."

"Assumptions can be dangerous, JUST ASK!!"
Explore more quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson


"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions."


"The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law's officers, which may at times assail the most honest."


"They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener."


"Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life."


"Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men," said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain."


"A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right."
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