Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be for thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Genesis 3:16.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of thesituation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.

-Merton, Robert King
  'The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy', in Social Theory and Social Structure (rev. edn,1968), p.477. This is the first use of the phrase 'self-fulfilling prophecy'.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answerscan, asa rule, be knowntobetrue, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

-Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl
  The Problems of Philosophy, ch.14.

Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

-Strachey, (Giles) Lytton
  EminentVictorians,'Florence Nightingale'.