You don't have to believe everything you think.

Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.

"All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."

---George Eliot, "Middlemarch"

I wonder how often stuff like this happens. My father mispronounced "sword" until college. Somehow things just get missed in education (formal and self)-- I have to wonder what is that one fact or event that everyone around me knows about but I don't!

Anyone else have examples of things educated people are supposed to know of that they somehow never learned about until surprisingly late?

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." -- Goethe

"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance" - John Archibald Wheeler

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." -- Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

(This is not necessarily a rationalist quote, but yet, it kinda is :))

"Every conviction is a prison" ---- Nietzsche

Note: phaedrus has provided a citation to "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", noting that this quote is only part of the sentence.

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise" - Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (Part of the full sentence)

It's not really surprising, though, is it? Brilliant people want to have other brilliant people as their colleagues.

(In fact, one mathematician of my acquaintance said that he once dabbled in circuit design, but when his first paper in the field was received as a major achievement, he left it immediately, concluding that if he could make such a large contribution so easily, the field must be unworthy of him.)