These layman quotes will inspire you. Layman, a person without professional or specialized knowledge in a particular subject.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging layman quotes, layman sayings, and layman proverbs.
Best Layman Quotes
- “The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, “sees” things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different.” ~ Rudolf Arnheim
- “I am no theologian. I am a layman. I am among those who are preached to, and who listen. It is not for me to preach. I should not willingly forego being a listener, a man who reads the Gospels and then listens to what others say that our Lord meant. But sometimes a listener speaks out, and listens to his own voice.” ~ Haniel Long
- “If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. … [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery.” ~ Gerald Holton
- “The layman always means, when he says “reality” that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli
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“A simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it” ~ Martin Luther
- “There was on section in First Corinthians 13 that talks about (showing) patience, kindness, politeness, how can I demonstrate forgiveness to my children and more fully enjoy them as they’re growing up and vice versa. And so, each of those has a day’s journey. There are 40 days that people will go through in applying these biblical principles for their kids. We spell them out in layman’s terms so it’s really easy to grasp a principle.” ~ Alex Kendrick
- “In Western lands there is a distinct division between the religious and the secular life. There is one rule of conduct for laymen and another for clergymen. This distinction has never found its place in the life of the people of India. There, all of life is included in the word ‘religion.'” ~ Virchand Gandhi , Layman quotes life
- “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must believe?” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “That I am a monk and you are a layman is of no importance … rather that we are both in the light of the Holy Spirit … Acquire peace, and thousands around you will be saved.” ~ Seraphim of Sarov
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“In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt reminded us that the Constitution is, and I quote, “a layman’s document, not a lawyer’s contract.”” ~ Mike DeWine
- “BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We’ve associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you’ve no clue, because it’s almost become math. And it’s odd that if you don’t do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get ‘homespun’ attached to it.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “I’m not the guy who will sit in a room with somebody who’s using a bunch of big words and just act like I know what they’re talking about, or sit on set with somebody and they’ll be trying to explain something and not using layman’s terms and I’ll just say, “Hey, excuse me, what do you mean by that? Explain to me so I just understand.”” ~ Mark Wahlberg
- “I’m not the guy who will sit in a room with somebody who’s using a bunch of big words and just act like I know what they’re talking about, or sit on set with somebody and they’ll be trying to explain something and not using layman’s terms and I’ll just say, “Hey, excuse me, what do you mean by that? Explain to me so I just understand.”” ~ Mark Wahlberg
- “Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.” ~ Gian-Carlo Rota
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“The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.” ~ Alan Perlis
- “An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true – to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth – the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.” ~ Robert Motherwell
- “God belongs to all free beings. He is the life of all, the salvation of all ~faithful and unfaithful, just and unjust, pious and impious, passionate and dispassionate, monks and laymen, wise and simple, healthy and sick, young and old just as the effusion of light, the sight of the sun, and the changes of the seasons are for all alike; ‘for there is no respect of persons with God.'” ~ John Climacus
- “Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.” ~ James Clerk Maxwell
- “Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I’ve become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn’t streamed into science, and I regret that now.” ~ John Noble
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“Don’t explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
- “The lawyers’ contribution to the civilizing of humanity is evidenced in the capacity of lawyers to argue furiously in the courtroom, then sit down as friends over a drink or dinner. This habit is often interpreted by the layman as a mark of their ultimate corruption. In my opinion, it is their greatest moral achievement: It is a characteristic of humane tolerance that is most desperately needed at the present time.” ~ John Silber
- “When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.” ~ Salvador Dali
- “Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen’s use of language, it’s a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it’s a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they’re theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing… Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.” ~ Betty Friedan
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“A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.” ~ John Dryden
- “Philosophy can help laymen spot and reject the numerous pseudoscientific beliefs that survive in the media, such as the fantasies of psychoanalysts, evolutionary psychologists, and economic equilibrium theorists.” ~ Mario Bunge
- “Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword “scientific objectivity” and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.” ~ Richard M. Weaver
- “It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.” ~ Peter Medawar
- “The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy.” ~ Benjamin Graham
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“Fooling laymen with science is sometimes so easy it should be criminal.” ~ Mira Grant
- “Fighting is spiritual. It appears to be physical from the layman’s eyes. In my fights, I seemed to be angry and mad – all that stuff you saw me doing, the yelling and screaming and being mean in the ring – but I’m cool as a cucumber. I can hear everybody talking around me outside of the ring. I can see everybody. I know what is going on.” ~ Mike Tyson
- “A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming – telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.” ~ Leonard Susskind
- “The right to be heard would be, in many cases, of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel. Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law.” ~ George Sutherland
- “Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.” ~ Erwin Chargaff
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“If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company.” ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
- “Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it.” ~ Norman Corwin
- “Any man who is intelligent must, on considering that health is of the utmost value to human beings, have the personal understanding necessary to help himself in diseases, and be able to understand and to judge what physicians say and what they administer to his body, being versed in each of these matters to a degree reasonable for a layman.” ~ Hippocrates
- “We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.” ~ William Tyndale
- “Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. … Though to the layman, the world revealed by the chemist may seem more commonplace, it is not so to him. Each new insight into how the atoms in their interactions express themselves in structure and transformations, not only of inanimate matter, but particularly also of living matter, provides a thrill.” ~ Henry Taube
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“By dividing the people of God as clergy and laymen, we have made the latter a majority of lame men.” ~ Richard P. Stanley
- “You should not fool the laymen when you’re talking as a scientist… . I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.” ~ Richard P. Feynman
- “For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?” ~ Richard Courant
- “The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.” ~ Sigmund Freud
- “A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.” ~ Umberto Eco
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“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.” ~ Rachel Carson
- “The search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman’s alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.” ~ Joanne Harris
- “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make-believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
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“Most magicians are nothing more than laymen with rabbits on their business cards” ~ Darwin Ortiz
- “Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.” ~ John Wesley
- “More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.” ~ Simone Weil
- “All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.” ~ Roger Bacon
- “And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning – enemies of society, as you call them. You’re kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God’s justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it’s easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!” ~ Georges Bernanos
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“The layman’s constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn’t like is unconstitutional.” ~ Hugo Black
- “There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.” ~ Hippocrates
- “Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.” ~ Howard S. Becker
- “Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.” ~ Howard S. Becker
- “About medications that are drunk or applied to wounds it is worth learning from everyone; for people do not discover these by reasoning but by chance, and experts not more than laymen.” ~ Hippocrates
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“You simply collapsed, sir. In layman’s terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.” ~ Scott Lynch
- “The entire force of the Conciliar revolt comes from the fact that it has apparently been imposed by the authority of the Church. How many bishops, priests, religious, and laymen, would have swallowed the lies of the heretics if they had not believed themselves bound to do so by the voice of Christ’s Vicar on earth? Questioning the authority of these men renders their revolution of doubtful authenticity.” ~ John Lane
- “The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.” ~ Oswald Spengler
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“Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers’ body.” ~ Felix Frankfurter
- “From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.” ~ Victor Francis Hess
- “Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.” ~ Amos Tversky
