Richard Owen Quotes

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.

The study of an idea is, of necessity, the story of many things.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.

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.

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: 'What is real? What is truth?' They have to learn it; they don't automatically know it. To them, it's a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

We ascend the hill-tops of philosophy, not to gaze up at the ever-visible heavens, but to embrace in one grand view the human world beneath us.

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

Intellectuals are people who manage the world in their head. They look at life and try to see some kind of truth, and if they cannot find it, they attempt to create it.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.

I'm excited to go study and read and immerse myself in something.

One thing I am determined on is that by the time I die my brain shall weigh as much as a man's if study and learning can make it so.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

If we trace the progress of our minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple ideas received from sensation or reflection, it will lead us farther than at first, perhaps, we should have imagined.

To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.