Did you know you can turn any of the short quotes on our site into an e-card?
Simply locate the quote you'd like to send, and if it fits on our card, you'll see an option for Send as greeting on the left side of the quote.
Or, if you'd like a more classic Greeting card, you can visit our Gaia Greeting Gallery.
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel - movement through space - provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions - perhaps one of the secret terrors - of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
Help
Sign In
