FYI 2025

If the soul is impartial in receiving information, it devotes to that information the share of critical investigation the information deserves, and its truth or untruth thus becomes clear. However, if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment’s hesitation the information that is agreeable to it. Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The result is that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted.

Ibn Khaldūn (1377) Muqaddimah

We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads — but to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate — but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Carl Edward Sagan (1990) Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

Bacteriophages: Viruses that infect bacteria © 2025 McMaster University

FYI 2024

There is the world for you. Beauty, true beauty, is intangible. It is in the eye of the beholder. Something that we can lose at any moment, and the more you examine it, the more illusive it becomes. True happiness is virtue, and virtue is predicated on knowledge and righteous conduct.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1105) The Alchemy of Happiness

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Nadine Gordimer (1963) Leaving School—II

A huge solar filament © 2024 E. S. Poupeau

FYI 2023

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. … Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (1020) Canon of Medicine

Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.

Francis Bacon (1605) The Advancement of Learning

A 2-month-old juvenile sea star © 2023 Dr. Laurent Formery

FYI 2022

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie (1937) "Madame Curie: A Biography"


Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.

Leo Tolstoy (1884) My Religion

Veil Nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionized gas
© 2022 ESA & NASA

FYI 2021

Do not merely practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; it deserves that, for only art and science can exalt man to divinity.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1812) Letter to Emilie


Truth is powerful, and, if not instantly, at least by slow degrees, may make good her possession. Gleams of good sense may penetrate through the thickest clouds of error. … and, as the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking; open to him new mines of science and new incentives to virtue; and perhaps, by a blended and compound effect, produce in him an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew.

William Godwin (1797) The Enquirer

Cellular landscape cross-section through a eukaryotic cell
© 2021 Ingersoll & McGill

FYI 2020

Wisdom, therefore, is what seizes upon happiness in truth, whereas prudence is what seizes upon what ought to be done so that happiness is attained. These two, therefore, are the two mutual assistants in perfecting the human being—wisdom being what gives the ultimate goal, and prudence being what gives the means by which that goal is gained.

al-Farabi (870-950) The Political Writings: "Selected Aphorisms" and Other Texts


Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

Philip J. Bailey (1839) Festus

First direct image of a black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 © 2020 EHT

FYI 2019

A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.

Nikola Tesla (1893) On Light And Other High Frequency Phenomena


You, the sought for; I, the seeker; this, the search:
And each is the mission of all.
For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes
The built cart out; and where we go is reason.
But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling
Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter.

Kenneth Patchen (1936) Selected Poems

Fern sorus, structures producing and containing spores © 2019 Nikon

FYI 2018

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Isaac Newton (1680s) Fragments from a Treatise on Revelation


There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1868) The Idiot

2017 Solar Eclipse © 2018 NASA

FYI 2017

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

Erwin Schrödinger (1918) "A Life of Erwin Schrödinger"


No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Nelson Mandela (1995) Long Walk to Freedom

Front foot (tarsus) of a male diving beetle © 2017 Nikon

FYI 2016

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Max Planck (1932) Where is Science Going?


The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

Carl Jung (1953) The Practice of Psychotherapy

Aurora Borealis © 2016 Marco Ottobelli

FYI 2015

The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

Jean Piaget (1964) "Piaget Rediscovered"


Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir (1947) The Ethics of Ambiguity

Giant Cerianthus (Cerianthus sp.) © 2015 UMiami

FYI 2014

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal.

Timothy F. Leary (1982) Changing My Mind, Among Others: Lifetime Writings

Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that.

Mewlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273) Dīvān-e Kabīr

White matter fibers of the human brain © 2014 Connectome

FYI 2013

The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of
the bright world dies

With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart
but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Francis Bourdillon (1873) The Night has a Thousand Eyes


But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.

Thomas Browne (1658) Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

Rho Ophiuchi astronomical cloud complex © 2013 NASA

FYI 2012

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer (1973) Reflections on the Human Condition


There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

Raymond Chandler (1938) Great Thought

Henbit deadnettle stamens and petal © 2012 Nikon

FYI 2011

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science


And the very air [student] breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for
truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.

Thomas H. Huxley (1874) Universities, Actual and Ideal

Arched eruption lifted off from The Sun © 2011 NASA

FYI 2010

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.

William J. Durant (1926) The Story of Philosophy


Education is … reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.

John Dewey (1916) Democracy and Education

Conception of human life during fertilization © 2010 Dr. David Phillips

FYI 2009

Words ought to be a little wild—for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.

J. Maynard Keynes (1933) National Self-Sufficiency. The Yale Review


Consciousness is reflected in the word as the sun in a small drop of water. The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness.

Lev S. Vygotsky (1934) Thought and Language

The most famous fractal: Mandelbrot set © 2009 PBS NOVA

FYI 2008

The aim of science is, on the one hand, a comprehension, as complete as possible, of the connection between the sense experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the accomplishment of this aim by the use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations.

Albert Einstein (1936) Physics and Reality


Perceptions are guided by preconceptions. … [Individuals'] expectations not only channel what they look for but partly affect what features they extract from observations and how they interpret what they see and hear.

Albert Bandura (1986) Social Foundations of Thought and Action

View of Earth from Moon in 1969 © 2008 NASA

FYI 2007

Knowledge of science is to know science,
Knowledge of science is self-knowledge;
If you fail to attain self knowledge,
What good is there in your studies?

Yunus Emre (1307) Risale [Treatise]


I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

Seymour Papert (1993) The Children's Machine

Mathematical surfaces © 2007 Palais & Benard

FYI 2006

It is science. It is a work of human conjecture, the task of formulating alternative paradigms and hypotheses with luck being able to test some of them, none of them ever completely.

Jerome S. Bruner (2005) Virginia and Leonard Marx Lecture, Teachers College


A theory is then a special gift, a gift for the mind in a society (of science, not the world) where thought and understanding are preeminent. A gift from one human being to another, to us all.

Roald Hoffmann (2003) Why buy that theory? American Scientist

Sharp Eye © 2006 Lolita Asil