• The Little Prince - On friends

There are men who fight one day and are good.
There are men who fight one year and are better.
There are some who fight many years and they are better still.
But there are some that fight their whole lives,
these are the ones that are indespensable.

Bertolt Brecht

The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence, these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my lucky stars I belong to it.

Albert Einstein

Witness that old image of wisdom so often translated, in German engravings, by a long-necked bird whose thoughts, rising slowly from heart to head, have time to be weighed and reflected on; a symbol whose values are blunted by being overemphasized: the long path of reflection becomes in the image of the alembic of a subtle learning, an instrument which distills quintessence. The neck of the Gutemensch is endlessly elongated, the better to illustrate, beyond wisdom, all the real mediations of knowledge...

Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason)

Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo (1623)

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

George Bernard Shaw

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr