Rethinking Quotes

“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told...and have a sense of humor doing it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle ----- [expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win.”
― Janis Joplin

“You have to choose your path.
You have to decide what you wish to do.
You are the only person that can determine your destiny.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“Of course, we often think we have to get sick literally in order to get the rest or pleasure we need in our lives. Bobbie and I therefore taught our children when they were younger that if they needed a day off from school, they should just say that and take a health day, not a sick day. That made them look at life differently. I think all of us need to rethink our attitudes toward health and sickness.”
― Bernie S. Siegel, Peace, Love and Healing: Bodymind Communication & the Path to Self-Healing: An Exploration

“I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“Set a daily solitude time for reflection and rethinking.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“...till thinking had worn out my enterprise, so stout at starting and so early lost.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, I. Inferno, Vol. I. Part 1: Text (Bollingen Series)

“English: "Human rethinking is a continuation of evolutionary rethinking."

Česky: „Lidské přemýšlení je pokračováním přemýšlení evoluce.”
― Sebastián Wortys