Recently added

Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption.

Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.

The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.

The educating of the parents is really the education of the child: children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves.

The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is.

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations.

Skepticism, however, cannot be removed from the scientific process. Science does not function without it.

A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions.

The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.

“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”

Once the “truth” has been declared, even if it’s based on incomplete evidence, the overwhelming tendency is to interpret all future observations in support of that preconception.

Believing that your hypothesis must be correct before all the evidence is gathered encourages you to interpret the evidence selectively.