Category Archives: Quotes

Dave Jilk, or as I like to call him, Professor Jilk, since he’s a professor in my “life university,” always provokes. I like emailing him tough issues and asking him to simply react, which he does, and it stimulates additional thinking.

He just sent me this very interesting quote by Bertrand Russell:

“When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed, the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.”

As Dave paraphrases in the comment to my post on certainty, “He actually says that the amount of passion involved in a belief is a MEASURE of the lack of rational basis for the belief.”

This morning I had the honor of meeting T.A. Barron, an acclaimed novelist living here in Boulder. His amazingly successful life has taken him around the world as a Rhodes scholar, to New York for the venture capital business, and now to Boulder to write best-selling novels and stories. He shared with me this quote from Henry David Thoreau, which I loved:

To affect the quality of the day; that is the highest of the arts.

While looking up Thoreau, I also came across this quote, which I found provocative:

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

"Although the young person has never been old, the old person once was young. When you look up the age ladder, you look at strangers; when you look down the age ladder, you are always looking at versions of yourself. As an adult, those fantastic younger incarnations can seem either long left behind or all too continuous with who you are now."

Mark Grief, "Children of the Revolution" November 2006 Harpers

"Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe," Sakharov wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. "Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive."

– Andrei Sakharov in Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick's Pulitzer Prize winning account of the fall of the Soviet Union.