The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, if you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. ... their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.
I am persuaded that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born for it. For the difficulty is not in organisation and making plans; the test, the real test, of the leader, lies in holding widely different people together along the line of their common sympathies. And this can only be done unconsciously, never by trying.
Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.
The wicked can have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in debauchery, self-seekers have associates, the politic assemble the factions, the typical idler has connections, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous have friends.
Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real.
Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.
The only real knowledge is who you really are - a spiritual being created in the image in the likeness of a loving God. If you know that, everything you do will honor the wisdom and beauty you already own.
The Muslim world, with its history and cultures, and indeed its different interpretations of Islam, is still little known in the West. The two worlds, Muslim and non-Muslim, Eastern and Western, must, as a matter of urgency, make a real effort to get to know one another, for I fear that what we have is not a clash of civilisations, but a clash of ignorance on both sides.
Real spirituality is going through fire. Real spirituality is rebellion against all that is rotten, against all that is past, against all that is being forced on you by others, against all conditionings. Real spirituality is the greatest rebellion there is. It is risky, it is adventurous, it is dangerous. So beware of pseudo spirituality which is always there, available, easily available at the door.
Success is not achieved by winning all the time. Real success comes when we rise after we fall. Some mountains are higher than others. Some roads steeper than the next. There are hardships and setbacks but you cannot let them stop you. Even on the steepest road you must not turn back.
Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.
Our conflict is in relationship, at all levels of our existence; and the understanding of this relationship, completely and extensively, is the only real problem that each one has.