“Our search for the ultimate meaning of our lives is not a matter of a particular intelligence, or some special effort, or even exceptional means. Rather, finding the ultimate truth is like discovering something beautiful along one’s path. One sees and recognizes it, if one is attentive. The issue then, is this attention.” Father Luigi Giussani
“It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.” – Einstein
“Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants… Comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.” Winston Churchill, “Thoughts and Adventures”
“My life is a listening; His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.” – Thomas Merton
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Albert Einstein
“Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.” Albert Einstein
“Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.” Epicurus
“It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds” – St Augustine
“My God is me. Whatever I regain is mine by right. This is the source of all my strength and pride.” – Adam
“Science without religion is lame. Religion without Science is blind.” Albert Einstein
“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.” – Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (Letter to Bolyai, 1808)
“Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man” – Thoreau
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde
“Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.” – W.H. Auden (describing what an ancient Athenian might say of our civilization)
“Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.” – Benjamin Franklin
“There is no method but to be very intelligent.” – T.S. Eliot
“And yet, there is just the delight of finding something out and teaching it to others.”
“It is Jesus [who] you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted” Pope John Paul II
“The man who stakes his whole life on its pleasurable moments often becomes desperate in his search for them.”
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A mathematician learns more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything.”