Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Charles DarwinRead
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Interpretation
Recognizing our own ignorance is essential for personal growth and understanding.
This quote by Charles Darwin emphasizes the importance of acknowledging our limitations and knowledge gaps. By being aware of our ignorance, we open ourselves up to learning and growth, which is crucial for intellectual and personal development.
In practice
During a team meeting, I quoted Darwin to encourage team members to share what they don't know.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
I am quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science....It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts.
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps
Until the juice ferments a while in the cask, it isn't wine. If you wish your heart to be bright, you must do a little work.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
Then, accepting the help of God and of God's signs, he allows his personal legend to guide him toward the tasks that life has reserved for him.
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
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