A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance & Other Essays

Good words scarcely find any listeners

— Augustine of Hippo, City of God

Although we know the end of the maze holds death… I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me who I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being – one of many ways – and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.

— Daniel Keyes, Flowers For Algernon

Indeed, people speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Brothers Karamazov

…what most religious propositions may lack in plausibility they make up for by being memorable, emotionally salient, and socially consequential.

— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape