“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things’. ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”.
Many of the huge advances in human knowledge or abilities came from people who believed in something that their peers considered impossible or even absurd.
“As a human being one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If such humility could be conveyed to everybody, the world of human activities would be more appealing”.
Unlike many Einstein quotes, this one is attributable, he wrote it in correspondence to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium in 1932. It gently warns of the dangers of intellectual arrogance and the desperate drive of mankind to be able to explain everything. If such an intellectual colossus felt such humility in the face of what is, there is surely an example for the rest of us.
Beliefs and burgers
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