It is your own responsibility to stop yourself from thinking cultishly, no matter which group you currently happen to be operating in.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality

Learning must never stop. Blue dye is gotten from the indigo plant, and yet it is bluer than the plant. Ice comes from water, and yet it is colder than water. The gentleman learns broadly and examines himself thrice daily, and then his knowledge is clear and his conduct is without fault.

— Xun Kuang, Xunzi

…there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

The truth which we can see more and more clearly is that man has infinite potentiality, which, properly used, could make his life very much like his fantasies of heaven. In potentiality, he is the most awe-inspiring phenomenon in the universe, the most creative, the most ingenious. Throughout the ages, philosophers have sought to understand the true, the good, and the beautiful, and to speak for its forces. Now we know that the best place to look for them is in man himself.

— Right to be Human, Edward Hoffman

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature’s productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master

— David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary