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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Opinion

"In Zen they say: 'Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.' What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind. Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself." Eckhart Tolle

Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon Essay: Opinion

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Opinion

Plato: “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.”

Jane Austen: “Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”

Albert Einstein: “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

Epictetus: “Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.”

Bertrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

Cicero: “No liberal man would impute a charge of unsteadiness to another for having changed his opinion.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.”

John Stuart Mill: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

François de La Rochefoucauld: “We credit scarcely any persons with good sense except those who are of our opinion.”

Bernard Baruch: “Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.”