If life were a movie, physical reality would be the entire DVD: Future and past frames exist just as much as the present one.
Max TegmarkRead
So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn’t have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.
Interpretation
Advancing knowledge brings more questions, and humility is essential in the pursuit of understanding.
This quote by Max Tegmark emphasizes the idea that as we gain knowledge and understanding, it naturally leads to the emergence of new questions. It reminds us that we should remain humble and avoid arrogance in our quest for understanding, acknowledging that while we can make great strides in knowledge, there will always be more to learn and discover.
In practice
In a speech about scientific research, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of remaining open-minded.
I invented nothing new, I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom there was centuries of work.
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.
But Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn.
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.