Martin Gardner Quotes

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

We learn nothing by being right.

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

I am no one to be a purist.

Never make a principle out of your experience. Allow God to be as creative with others as He is with you.

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I would never feel confident enough to express my views and opinions as the right ones because I just don't think that's possible. There are so many sides to everything that nobody is right or wrong.

Do not judge. Never presume to judge another human being anyway. That's up to heaven.

I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt, not bein' so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us and doesn't speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn't care about others.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.

I'm an actress and a singer and I'm also a Christian. We're not all crazy right-wingers. I just want to be like Jesus, forgiving and loving and nonjudgmental, accepting of everyone even if they don't agree.

I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected.

It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant.

The best words for resolving a disagreement are, "I could be wrong; I often am." It's true.

We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart

Listening to others, especially those with whom we disagree, tests our own ideas and beliefs. It forces us to recognize, with humility, that we don't have a monopoly on the truth.

I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth

H. L. Mencken told me once that he answered all his mail, pleasant and unpleasant, with just one line, 'You may be right.' That's the way I feel now. It is in the realm of possibility, just barely, that I could be the one who's wrong.

We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.