Quotes about Facts

The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.

You have a brain and mind of your own. USE IT, and reach your own decisions. If you need facts or information from other people, to enable you to reach decisions, as you probably will in many instances; acquire these facts or secure the information you need quietly, without disclosing your purpose.

First, truth is made up of information and facts, but it also includes God's original intent, which makes it the absolute standard by which you can measure everything else. Second, truth has already been predetermined—decided ahead of time—by God. And third, what is true of you on the inside needs to be true of you on the outside.

What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?

The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried--that is history. He loved me and gave Himself for me--that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.

The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

We are assaulted by so much information each day that it's easy to lose touch with the voice inside us, the compelling sense of knowledge, the awareness we have in our gut. In addition, we're often conditioned to dismiss our instincts as primal and animalistic, subjective and unscientific. We're taught to rely on facts and figures, data and digits, not hunches and gut feelings.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful.

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed.

The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom.