Tao Te Ching
Opinion
Greek philosopher in 1st Century CE Rome, Epictetus described the ability to doubt, challenge, and even condemn opinion as the beginning of philosophy. 19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer talked about how while everyone wants to have an opinion, very few are willing to think for themselves so most accept ready-made, pre-packaged opinions without thinking them through. Spinoza believed uncontemplated opinions to be shackles that secretly enslave us and thought-leaders from Benjamin Franklin to Bertrand Russell warn against having too solid of an opinion too soon. Balthasar Gracian famously told us that “All fools are fully convinced and everyone fully convinced is a fool.” The problem isn’t having opinions though. Modern life is most-likely impossible without opinions. The problem is believing our opinions or at least taking them too seriously. If we believe in them as absolute truth, they become a narrow, cement-made prison. If we understand them as an hypothesis, a current description open to revision and change, they stay our servants instead of becoming a tyrannical master.
Quotes (84)
“No man knows distinctly anything, and no man ever will... all things are matters of opinion.”
“Learn the unshaken heart of persuasive truth. Don’t believe status quo opinions in which there is no truth at all.”
“Everyone believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.”
“It is not profanity to deny the gods of the vulgar, but it is profanity to measure the gods by the opinions of the vulgar.”
“Most of us are as sure about the truth of our opinions as the wise are about the truth of what they know.”
“Good luck changes into bad and bad luck changes into good. The workings of events are beyond comprehension.”
“It is only our opinions and principles that can render us unhappy, and it is only the ignorant person that finds fault with another.”
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
“In these days people only seek to stuff themselves with knowledge… All you can call them is people who suffer from indigestion… All the concepts you have formed in the past must be discarded and replaced by void.”
“Is not the supreme end of philosophy to search out by means of reason the truth that opinions and substitute in their place, the reign of reason in all things?”
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.”
“Usually those who have limited understanding think they know more, and those who have no brains, think they know everything.”
“Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue.”
“Everything is good or everything is bad according to who you ask… aim to be independent of any one opinion, of any one fashion, of any one century.”
“All fools are fully convinced and everyone fully convinced is a fool.”
“Force and not opinion is the queen of the world; but it is opinion that uses force.”
“Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.”
“If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!”
“Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise 20 times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.”
“From all those ideas which have crowded into my brain in conflict with each other, I have obtained nothing but uncertainty. However, it is much more sad and foolish for a man to believe he knows what in fact he does not.”
“Our debates were… to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth without… desire of victory… all expressions of positiveness in opinions or direct contradiction were prohibited.”
“As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”
“Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.”
“The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it.”
“Opinion is the castle, or rather the temple of human nature; and, if it be polluted, there is no longer any thing sacred or venerable”
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mid.”
“there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
“Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.”
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he would be justified in silencing mankind.”
“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion; against the tendency of society to impose its own... rules of conduct on those who dissent from them”
“Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until the fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?”
“Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was than simply to know it, for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.”
“most men—including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity—can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
“One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”
“There is much to be said for modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with ignorance of the community.”
“There is no doubt that a teacher—once committed to a certain line of thought—will cling to that line long after all others have deserted it. In trying to convince others, he convinces himself.”
“Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average person.”
“All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
“I have no preconceived impressions or beliefs or opinions... Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of today?—is not that the best life we know?”
“A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.”
“One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”
“The genuine Liberal does not say ‘this is true’, he says ‘I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best.’”
“whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations - as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness - nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”
“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.”
“centralization – the elimination of independent groups – leads to one-sidedness, barrenness… because such centralization suppresses rivalry of opinions.”
“I knew full well that a name imprisons the soul, cramps it so that it can fit inside a word, obliges it to take whatever it has of the inexpressible, all the most precious qualities for which no substitute can be found, and abandon them outside this name's boundaries.”
“knowledge of God is possible only to those who 'have ceased to cherish opinions'—even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be”
“I think of my own opinions as being superficial... I keep them in watertight compartments... but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom”
“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinion as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as this of the majority.”
“The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.”
“There were on one side people with noble political ideas who tired to apply them, and on the other side those without a particular ideology who tried simply to make things work… I believed in just striving to make things work without a particular message… There is the same idea in Change Tzu: ‘Don’t look any longer for truth, just stop cherishing your opinions!’”
“those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”
“Hypothesis is the heart which no man with right purpose wears willingly upon his sleeve.”
“The word I render as ‘opinion’ can be read as ‘knowing too soon’: the mind obeying orders, judging before the evidence is in closed to fruitful perception and learning… Buddhists and Taoists agree in having a very low opinion of opinion.”
“What’s important isn’t which opinions and beliefs someone has but how they hold them: as a rigid dogma or tentatively, realizing that new evidence at any moment could change them.”
“Opinions and beliefs can be helpful... as long as we don't believe them”
“I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking.”
“You and your wakefulness have different opinions altogether... the whole thing goes wrong at the very beginning. And that split is not a 'once upon a time' story—it happens all the time in your everyday life.”
“On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings... Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?”
“our ideas... The longer we look at them, the more cracks we see, until eventually the whole set of beliefs and opinions on which we've based our understanding of ourselves and the world around us begins to crumble.”
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