Often - Quotes
By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are.
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often they almost come to believe it... Though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.
You can never pinpoint the exact moment that a species came to be, because it never did. Just like how you used to be a baby and now you're older, but there was no single day when you went to bed young and woke up old. (...) There was no first human. It sounds like a paradox, it sounds like it breaks the whole theory of evolution, but it's really a key to truly understanding how evolution works. Evolution happens like a movie, with frames moving by both quickly and gradually, and we often can't see the change while it's occurring. Every time we find a fossil, it's a snapshot back in time, often with thousands of frames missing in between, and we're forced to reconstruct the whole film. Life is what happens in between the snapshots. Instead of a nice smooth road this is a journey on stepping stones and we give each one their own name.
We live in a society where people are uncomfortable with not knowing. Children aren`t taught to say "I don`t know," and honesty in this form is rarely modeled for them. They too often see adults avoiding questions and fabricating answers, out of either embarrassment or fear, and this comes at a price. When children are embarrassed by or afraid of the feeling of not knowing, they are preoccupied with escaping their discomfort, rather than being motivated to learn. This robs them of the joy of curiosity. Let`s celebrate the feelings of awe and wonder in our children, as the foundation for all learning. Let`s teach children to say "I don`t know" and help them understand the power behind it. Let`s talk to them about how it feels to not know something. And, finally, let`s be honest with children about the limits of our own knowledge.
Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that`s a really good argument; my position is mistaken", and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn`t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
I know firsthand that challenging times often come first before the most rewarding moments.
Outside observers often assume that the more complicated a piece of mathematics is, the more mathematicians admire it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mathematicians admire elegance and simplicity above all else, and the ultimate goal in solving a problem is to find the method that does the job in the most efficient manner.
Advances in science are often delayed because the common wisdom holds that something is impossible.
When you`re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.
How many times have you heard that "more is better, " "fake it ‘til you make it, " or "clothes make the man?" They tell us that more stuff means more happiness, when in fact, more stuff often means more headaches and more debt.
It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime. We should all smile more often.