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philosophy

The only reasonable numbers are zero, one and infinity.
	-- Bruce MacLennan

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
        Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 15.

To Pure Mathematics - may it never have any practical use!

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are when he is not calculating and
thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the
art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not
think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the
waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly
heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring
breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.
	-- D.T. Suzuki

Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm." 
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad." 
Homer: "Thank you, dear." 
Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away." 
Homer: "Oh, how does it work?" 
Lisa: "It doesn't work." 
Homer: "Uh-huh." 
Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock." 
Homer: "Uh-huh." 
Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?" 
Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."

This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.
	-- John Adams

Alice laughed, "There is no use trying," she said, "one can't believe
impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your
age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as
many as six impossible things before breakfast."
	-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?" "'Quined' quined" quines "quined."

There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
	-- Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
	-- Philip K. Dick

HUMANKERRO: Well, what are the rules for being Avata?
     AVATA: Ahhh, Humankerro, we embody such knowledge but we cannot know it.
HUMANKERRO: You appear to be saying that such knowledge cannot be reduced to
            language.
     AVATA: Language cannot occur in a reference vacuum.

-- Frank Herbert, Bill Ransom, _The Jesus Incident_

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by
our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, and by the
immobility of our conceptions of them."
	-- Frank Herbert, Bill Ransom, _The Jesus Incident_

"... it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one
man seems nonsense to another."
	-- Hermann Hesse, _Siddhartha_

"No matter where you go, there you are."
	-- Buckaroo Banzai, _Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension_

"The more you know, the less you understand."
	-- Tao Te Ching

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it."
	-- G.K. Chesterton

"How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to
account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my
state of mind?"
	-- Douglas Adams, _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the
Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which
states that this has already happened."
	-- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

"'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.'
'Very deep,' said Arthur, 'you should send that in to the "Reader's Digest".
They've got a page for people like you.'"
	-- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of
old ones.
	--John Cage