Quotes

Here are some quotes I find insightful and personally impactful.

Samuel Beckett
  • "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (The real motto of optimism)
Jorge Luis Borges
  • “What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”
Jacob Bronowski
  • "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." (The Ascent of Man)
Georg Cantor
  • “To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.”
David Deutsch
  • “It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.” (in his book The Beginning of Infinity)
  • "If you think something is a barrier, and it's not a law of physics (which it never is), then it's not a barrier ― it's a problem. And all life is problem solving. Even if you can't solve it at the moment, it's much better psychologically to have a problem than a barrier."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "A little integrity is better than any career"
  • "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
  • "There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
Susan Ertz
  • “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
Richard P. Feynman
  • "You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting."
Werner Heisenberg
  • "An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”
Horace
  • "The just man, firm of purpose"
C.S. Lewis
  • "From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it [the inner ring], you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness." (in his essay "The Inner Ring")
  • "We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass." (in his essay "The Inner Ring")
  • "No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original -- and doesn't notice it."
John Stuart Mill
  • "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."
Karl Popper
  • "I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days."
  • "I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we do not know much ... It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal." (in his book Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)
  • "If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations." (I share Popper's dream)
  • "The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it: he consciously searches for his errors in the hope of learning by their discovery and elimination. The method of science is the critical method."
  • "You have to be bold enough to tackle a problem head on, but you have to be modest enough to expect that what appears to you as a solution is most likely just another mistake."
  • "But I have been most happy in finding new problems, in wrestling with them, and in making some progress. This, or so I feel, is the best life."
  • "If I am right in my conjecture that we grow, and become ourselves, only in interaction with world 3 [the world of objective knowledge], then the fact that we can all contribute to this world, if only a little, can give comfort to everyone; and especially to one who feels that in struggling with ideas he has found more happiness than he could ever deserve."
  • “Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or ‘to society’) to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do – the cardinal sin – is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.”
  • “The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted – except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say 'It is our duty to remain optimists', this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but, rather, to fight for a better world.”
J.D. Salinger
  • "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around---nobody big, I mean---except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff---I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be." (The Catcher in the Rye)
Amos Tversky
  • “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
John Archibald Wheeler
  • “Anyone who expects to create, be it as a scientist or artist, scholar or writer, needs self-confidence, even bravado. How else can one dare to imagine understanding what no one else has understood, discovering what no one else has discovered? Where does this confidence come from? Fortunately, every young person is blessed with some of it. It is part of human character.”
  • "Our whole problem is to make mistakes as fast as possible."
Xenophanes
  • The Ethiops say that gods are flat-nosed and black
    While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

    Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw
    And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods
    Like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape
    Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

    The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
    All things' to us; but in the course of time,
    Through seeking we may learn, and know things better ....

    These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.
    But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
    Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
    Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
    And even if by chance he were to utter
    The final truth, he would himself not know it:
    For all is but a woven web of guesses.