Quotes About Open-mindedness

The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is, who find the least fault.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything; one's last is to come to terms with everything.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

Beware of the man of one book.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it is not boring, but very interesting.

One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears - by listening to them.

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.

Today changes must come fast; and we must adjust our mental habits, so that we can accept comfortably the idea of stopping one thing and beginning another overnight.... We must assume that there is probably a better way to do almost everything. We must stop assuming that a thing which has never been done before probably cannot be done at all.

Much as he is opposed to lawbreaking, he is not bigoted about it.

Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.

We will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn.

Thou shouldst not decide until thou hast heard what both have to say.

Half the secret of getting along with people is consideration of their values; the other half is tolerance in one's own views.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done. ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

None so deaf as those that will not hear.

We cannot safely assume that other people's minds work on the same principles as our own. All too often, others with whom we come in contact do not reason as we reason, or do not value the things we value, or are not interested in what interests us.

[Tolerance] is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

There is no adequate defence, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

You can be non-judgmental, but you don't want to be non-discerning because, remember, the force of evolution is the conversation, you know: two truths standing up to each other in conversation, and the best truth emerges, and the best truth prevails.