Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Quotes

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

My motivation is to get a deeper understanding and exploration of something that I want to know about the human condition. So, that's what I look for in the material I read: if it's asking a genuine question about a concept of the world that interests me. And also, it helps if it's a context that I find interesting.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

What we have learned from other becomes our own reflection.

Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge.

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.

If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

Reincarnation is not an exclusively Hindu or Buddhist concept, but it is part of the history of human origin. It is proof of the mindstream's capacity to retain knowledge of physical and mental activities. It is related to the theory of interdependent origination and to the law of cause and effect.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.

Do you believe in reincarnation?...I was wondering why some connections seem so easy, so natural, as if they'd already been made and are getting picked up again.

As precious as knowledge itself is the learning. As precious as any reward is the earning.

Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. I knew I knew very little, but I was certain that the things I had yet to learn wouldn't be taught to me at George Washington High School.

Content if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, The learn'd reflect on what before they knew.

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? ...Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.

I had gone to school to work on technique and found it wasn't something that was really worthwhile to me, although it probably was.

Arrayed in a new body another mother may someday give birth so that with stronger limbs and brighter mind the old soul shall take the road to earth again.