Rodney Brooks Quotes

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

I am a mystery to myself.

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

No one will ever know the complete truth.

I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.

I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways.

I think people are scared of progress and change.

Ever since I was a little kid, there was something about change that scared me so much, but, at the same time, I've always been terrified of being stuck, so it's kind of like a paradox that I'm living.

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what's comfortable, and we're afraid of the different. We're afraid of change.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

No one knows what I am and really, I wonder if I do, at the end of the day.

No man knows himself as an original.

We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.

Every one is least known to himself, and it is very difficult for a man to know himself.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

For many people, change is more threatening than challenging. They see it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting.

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it's hard to pin a label onto something that's always moving.

Every being is in search of truth, but small fears go on preventing you.

I don't want to change anything, because I don't know how to deal with change.