Quotes from Hugh Nibley

Doctors and trainers often see perfectly developed bodies, but nobody can even begin to imagine what a perfect *mind* would be like; that is where the whole range of progress and growth must take place.

Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another.

As knowledge increases, the verdict of yesterday must be reversed today, and in the long run the most positive authority is the least to be trusted.

Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else—Satan has us just where he wants us.

You can always somebody who is worse than you are to make you feel virtuous. It's a cheap shot: those awful terrorists, perverts, communists--they are the ones who need to repent! Yes, indeed they do, and for them repentance will be a full-time job, exactly as it is for all the rest of us.

Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.

The gas-law of learning: . . . any amount of information no matter how small will fill any intellectual void no matter how large.

The book of Isaiah is a tract for our own times; our very aversion to it testifies to its relevance.

Who can be 'agents unto themselves' if they are in bondage to others and have to accept their terms?

In the business of scholarship, evidence is far more flexible than opinion. The prevailing view of the past is controlled not by evidence but by opinion.

The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty.

When, indeed, is a thing proven? Only when an individual has accumulated in his own consciousness enough observations, impressions, reasonings and feelings to satisfy him personally that it is so. The same evidence which convinces one expert may leave another completely unsatisfied.

Can the mere convenience that makes money such a useful device continue indefinitely to outweigh the horrendous and growing burden of evil that it imposes on the human race and ultimately brings its dependents to ruin?

Self-justification, that was the danger-- the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all.

In that atmosphere, false information flourishes; and subjects in tests are "eager to listen to and believe any sort of preposterous nonsense."16

says Joseph Smith, "is co-equal with God himself." What greater crime than the minimizing of such capacity? The Prophet continues, "All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement.

One of the peculiar traits of Egyptian culture and belief is, surprisingly enough, an obsession with the idea of eternal progression,147 another nomad heritage. The saints, das wandernde Gottesvolk, have always been drawn to distant horizons and spurned "this present world" as altogether too confining.148 The passage from world to world and from horizon to horizon was dramatized in the ordinances of the temple, which itself represented a horizon.