"Bernard avait raison. Le germe n'est rien, c'est le terrain qui est tout" -- Louis Pasteur's deathbed words
("Bernard is right; the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything.")
"In almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied." -- John Stuart Mill
"Every poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing should be old or borrowed however cannot be." -- Gerald Manley Hopkins
"Es ist meine Überzeugung, daß die intentionale Phänomenologie zum ersten Male den Geist als Geist zum Feld systematischer Erfahrung und Wissenschaft gemacht und dadurch die totale Umstellung der Erkenntnisaufgabe erwirkt hat." -- Edmund Husserl, Die Philosophie in der Krisis der europäischen Menschheit
("It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge.")
And further
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of the atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." -- J. B. S. Haldane, "When I am Dead"
"Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est." -- Thomas Aquinas
(A human being should be more than merely human)
"Our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends." -- Michael Polanyi
Immediately applicable
"Let not hatred of a people cause you to be unjust" -- Koran 5:8
The practical consequence of [individualist] philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,—is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.