Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
The Mismeasure of Man
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Memory is knowledge; character is the box of values and habits in which our knowledge knocks around. People with a lot of knowledge thrown together in a box that encourages social intercourse and experimentation tend to come up with good ideas, which are the engine of change. Think of Silicon Valley in California, or Oxbridge in the United Kingdom.
You have perhaps heard the story of the four students -- British, French, American, Canadian -- who were asked to write an essay on elephants. The British student entitled his essay "Elephants and the Empire." The French student called his "Love and the Elephant." The title of the American student's essay was "Bigger and Better Elephants," and the Canadian student called his "Elephants: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?"
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
I remember those years when we shared the joy of love, / that tiny little pond, hidden in the courtyard! / We were close and intimate, we never were apart, / meeting beneath flowers, / meeting beneath willows -- / a song sung at a feast among curtains of gold!
But in a moment happiness turned to desolation; / frightening off the mandarin ducks, / how cruel the wind-blown waves! / As I ponder I realize there's no one I can blame -- / she was wrong, / I was wrong, / for all our good relationship bad feelings did arise.
Translated by Jonathan Chaves in The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, / And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, / Awaits alike th' inevitable hour: / The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.
Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
What can I wish to the youth of my country who devote themselves to science?... Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 -- even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to register the effects of violence -- marked and dated as an indictment.
Dear Boullée
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
One paramount truth / our society smothers / in petty concern / with position and pelf: / It isn't enough / to exasperate others; / you've got to remember / to gladden yourself.
In order to solve this differential equation you look at it until a solution occurs to you.
First, you must know what the thing is, and then after learn the use of the same.
Nor is it very difficult to understand why a Canadian passport should be so popular. Part of the explanation is that with it one can travel easily almost anywhere. Another reason for the popularity of the little blue booklet stamped in gold is that one can speak English or French or Ukranian or Polish or Chinese and still be a Canadian. One can, in fact, be almost anyone and still be a Canadian; and to be a Canadian is to have a passport to the whole world.
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
When this grey world crumbles like a cake / I'll be hanging from the hope / That I'll never see that recipe again.
"It's Not My Birthday"
I know that 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.
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
"Our Allotted Lifetimes", in The Panda's Thumb
Now, that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have regard of mankind, is a toy and vanity worthy to be laughed at.
... those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena -- care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!
A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.
High Weirdness By Mail
There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
Since this Galaxy began, vast civilizations have risen and fallen, risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it's quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be (a) something akin to seasick -- space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing, and (b) stupid.
Life, the Universe and Everything
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Marchbanks' Almanac
Y is for YGGDRASIL. The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes through that empty pasture with a freeway.
"From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"
This principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
The First Three Minutes
I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.