"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."
        -Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Here are some choice quotes on some of my favorite themes:
  Education; Schools; Writing; Encouragement (and hard work);
  Science, Learning, and Discovery; Mathematics; Technology;
  Committees; Stupidity; and Life and Virtue . There are also
  some miscellaneous bits of humor... Enjoy!
                                                Dave    dave.rusin@gmail.com
  P.S. --  I try to keep accurate attributions but
  of course you'll have to take them all with a grain of salt.
      "Don't trust everything you read on the Internet."
         -Abraham Lincoln


ON EDUCATION

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
   -Plutarch

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
   -Nelson Mandela

The future is a race between education and catastrophe.
   -H.G. Wells

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents,
for these only gave life, those the art of living well.
   -Aristotle

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a
decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
   -Chinese proverb

In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the
third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching others.
   -Ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher (c. 1022-1058)

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
   -Japanese proverb

He who dares to teach must never cease to learn.
   -Richard Henry Dann

The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.
   -Giovanni Ruffini, writer (1807-1881)

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
   -Margaret Fuller, author (1810-1850)

By the miracle of teaching, I can give you some of my ability,
without losing any of it myself.
   -Ashleigh Brilliant's longest epigram

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the
rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing
civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest
honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
   -Lee Iacocca, automobile executive (1924- )

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy
except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
   -Gibbons, cited by Feynman in his preface to his "Lectures on Physics"

A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a
desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.
   -Horace Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
   -Will Durant

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you
know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
   -Anatole France

If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away from him.
An investment of knowledge always pays the best interest.
   -Benjamin Franklin

Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will
never, ever get it out.
   -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530)

Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence,
To bore thyself and bore the students?
   -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A truth does not become greater by repetition.
   -Maimonides (1135-1204)

When one teaches, two learn.
   -Robert Heinlein

A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough
to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.
   -Ronald Knox

Education: That which discloses to the wise
and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
   -Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

The test and the use of man's education is that
he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
   -Jacques Martin Barzun

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions
about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming
an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able
to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated.
   -Edith Hamilton

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
   -Francis Bacon

Action without study is fatal. Study without action is futile.
   -Mary Beard

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.
   -Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he
eats it, sleeps it and dreams it -- this man can always teach it with
success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
   -H. L. Mencken

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect
wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them
to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
   -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

People have nowadays . . . got a strange opinion that everything 
should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do 
so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. 
Lectures were once useful; but now, when we can all read, and  books 
are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary.
   -Samuel Johnson according to James Boswell (1791)

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our
neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others,
and it becomes the property of all.
   -Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)

Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
   -Robert Heinlein

David Langford, illustrates the difference between teaching and 
learning in a little story. He says, 'You know, last Wednesday I 
taught my dog to whistle. I really did. I taught him to whistle. It 
was hard work. I really went at it very hard.  But I taught him to 
whistle. Of course, he didn't learn, but I taught.'
   -Myron Tribus (2001)

To sum up: I am the man who when the concern pressed him and his way
was straitened and he could find no other device by which to teach a
demonstrable truth other than by giving satisfaction to a single
virtuous man while displeasing ten thousand ignoramuses -- I am he
who prefers to address that single man by himself, and I do not heed
the blame of those many creatures.
   -Moses Maimonedes, "Guide for the Perplexed"

The Mock Turtle went on. 'We had the best of educations . . . Reeling
and Writhing, of course, to begin with, and then the different branches
of Arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
  -Lewis Carroll

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble
their food, and tyrannize their teachers. What will become of them?
This world is truly coming to an end.
   -Socrates

Times are bad. Children don't listen to their parents and everyone is
writing a book.
   -attributed to Cicero, 106-43 BC

Praeceptores suos adulescens veneratur et suspicit.
(A young man respects and looks up to his teachers.)
   -Seneca the younger

A branch laden with fruits is closer to earth than the one without. The same
is true for people: the more the learning, the more humble one usually is.
   -Anu Garg

... Some egotism of this sort is inevitable, and I do not feel that it
really needs justification.  Good work is not done by `humble' men.
It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any
subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and
his own importance in it.  A man who is always asking `Is what I do
worth while?' and `Am I the right person to do it?' will always be
ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.
   -G. H. Hardy

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could
do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of
my light .' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity.
Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and
women is to stand out of their light.
   -John W. Gardner, author and educator (1912-2002)

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
   -Chuang-Tzu, philosopher (4th c. BCE)

A guidance counselor who has made a fetish of security, or who has
unwittingly surrendered his thinking to economic determinism, may steer a
youth away from his dream of becoming a poet, an artist, a musician or any
other of thousands of things, because it offers no security, it does not
pay well, there are no vacancies, it has no "future".
   -Henry M Wriston, 11th president of Brown University (1889-1978)

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.
The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer
exists.
   -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

Ignorance ain't bliss. Ignorance is ignorance.
   -bodmea

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your
temper or your self-confidence.
   -Robert Frost

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet
be determined to make them otherwise.
   -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand.
The less of either the people have, the less they want.
   -Charlotte Observer, 1897

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you;
but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
   -Don Marquis

I am a teacher... The life I lead is the most agreeable I can imagine.
[In the] classroom ... there await me a group of intelligent and
curious young ... [people] who read the books assigned them with a
sense of adventure and discovery, discuss them with zest, and listen
appreciatively to explications I may offer.  What makes the process
most satisfying is the conviction that ...  education is mankind's
most important enterprise.
   -Moses Hadas, "Old Wine, New Bottles -- A Humanist Teacher at Work", 1962

We lead students to the fountain of knowledge.
Some will drink deeply, some will take a few swallows, and some will just sip.
An increasing number will, as at the dentist, merely rinse before spitting out.
   -following Dale E. Arrington (1995)

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human;
they are made so.
   -Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, 1954

"...a state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education -
e.g. step into the polling booth and find that the computer has
generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer
unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the
voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on
over that booth - and you slink out, face red, you having just proved
yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the
grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system -
smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers -
and fathers - decline to be humiliated twice."
   -Robert Heinlein, in "Expanding Universe"

Education is a process that either never begins or never ends.
   -unknown


ON SCHOOLS

If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to
get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving
the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting
that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.  The
college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious
and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to
rally their jaded spirits.  I would have the studies elective.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure
interest in knowledge.  The wise instructor accomplishes this by
opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for
himself.  The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for
boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
   -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Universities are institutions run by amateurs to train professionals.
   -Derek Bok, Harvard University president

I never let schooling interfere with my education.
   -Mark Twain

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words `phenomenology' or
`structuralism', I reach for my buck knife."
   -Edward Abbey

You will always find some Eskimo ready instruct the Congolese on how
to cope with heat waves.
   -Stanislaw J. Lec

In examinations, the man who succeeds is not the man who can write well
about something that he knows, but the man who can write brilliantly about
something of which he knows nothing.
   -D.B. Jackson, the Royal Air Force

If you don't know, ask. You will be a fool for the moment,
but a wise man for the rest of your life.
   -Seneca

Everywhere children are schooled to become masters at
answering questions and to remain novices at asking them.
   -Dillon, 1988

What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive 5-year-old and a
dull, stupid 19-year-old?  14 years of the British educational system.
   -Bertrand Russell

Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College: Have plenty of football
for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty.

If law school is so hard to get through, how come there are so many lawyers?
   -Calvin Trillin

College education is one of the few places in our society where the
customer pays for something, then tries as hard as he can NOT to get
his money's worth.

Some people drink deeply from the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.

On one occasion a student burst into his office. "Professor Stigler, I
don't believe I deserve this F you've given me." To which Stigler
replied, "I agree, but unfortunately it is the lowest grade the
university will allow me to award."

Education is what you get from reading the small print.
Experience is what you get from NOT reading it!

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied on to do,
and that is to contradict other philosophers.
   -William James

You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him to find it
within himself.
   -Galileo Galilei

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in
education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
   -John F. Kennedy

There is nothing so stupid as an educated man,
if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
   -Will Rogers


ON WRITING

Some people have a way with words, others not have way.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and
I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
   -A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)

I don't mind that you think slowly
but I do mind that you are publishing faster than you think.
  -Wolfgang Pauli, physicist, Nobel laureate (1900-1958)

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else:
we can bore people long after we are dead.
   -Sinclear Lewis

This letter is longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
   -Blaise Pascal

He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the
cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
   -John Ray, naturalist (1627-1705)

Those who write clearly have readers,
those who write obscurely have commentators.
   -Albert Camus, writer and philosopher (1913-1960)

Better to write for yourself and have no public,
than to write for the public and have no self.
   -Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974)

The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reach us.
So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us
with the radiation of their personalities.
   -Kahlil Gibran, poet and artist (1883-1931)

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends
imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.
   -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882) 

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold
intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is a pleasure beyond
compare.
   -Kenko Yoshida, essayist (1283-1352)

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
   -Maya Angelou

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
   -Anton Chekhov, short-story writer and dramatist (1860-1904)

This book fills a much-needed gap.
   -Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book-I'll waste no time in reading it.
   -Moses Hadas, teacher and author (1900-1966)

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault;
it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical...
The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.
   -Morris Kline (1977)

Times are bad.
Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
   -Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Law of the Letter:
    The best way to inspire fresh thoughts is to seal the envelope.

Wait until the evening before the opening night. 
Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity,
whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work
or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. 
In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. 
   -Rossini

Easy reading is damned hard writing.
   -Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
   -Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us,
but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.
   -Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), rhetorician (c. 35-100) 

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it out of love.
Then you do it for a few friends. Finally you do it for money.
   -Moliere

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
   -John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire (1648-1721), _Essay on Poetry_

I just sit at the typewriter and curse a bit.
   -P G Wodehouse (1881-1975), on his technique as a writer, _Collier's_, 1956

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
   -James Nicoll

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
        [Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.]

I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said but
I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Caution: These words processed in a facility that contains nuts.
May contain traces of irony.  Contents liable to settle after sending.
This message is an all-natural product. The slight variations in
spelling and grammar enhance its individual character and beauty and
in no way are to be considered flaws or defects.


ON ENCOURAGEMENT AND HARD WORK

One kind word can warm three winter months. -Japanese proverb

Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise
As praises from the men, whom all men praise.
   -Abraham Cowley, poet (1618-1667)

Flatter me, and I may not believe you.
Criticize me, and I may not like you.
Ignore me, and I may not forgive you.
Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
   -William Arthur Ward (1921-1994), college administrator, US newspaper editor

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
[Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can.]
   -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
   -Proverbs 15:1

Criticism, like rain, should be
gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.
   -Frank A. Clark, writer (1911- )

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity.
   -Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)

I ended up a mathematics major because of a fifteen minute
conversation. The chair of the mathematics department at the
University of Florida, whose abstract algebra class I was taking,
struck up a conversation with me one day after class about my career
aspirations. His few minutes of guidance and encouragement literally
changed my life.
   -http://www.maa.org/data/careers/monticino.html

I might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier,
but I'm pretty good at getting most of the other bulbs to light up.
   -Jack Welch

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.
It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.
We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
   -Albert Schweitzer

Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines,
is beneficial in small, though injurious in large, quantities. No man who is
not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others.
   -Frederick Saunders, librarian and essayist (1807-1902)

If a man does his best, what else is there?
   -General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

Nobody made a greater mistake than
he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
   -Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio 
and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who 
would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, 
has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him 
or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
   -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist (1922-2007) 

The full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
   -definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a
lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.
   -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Obstacles are those frightful things you see
when you take your eyes off your goal.
   -Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Hard work spotlights the character of people; some turn up their sleeves,
some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all!

For each of us there is a set limit to our intellectual powers which
we cannot pass.
   -Rene Descartes

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving.
They make mistakes, but they don't quit.
  -Conrad Hilton

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.
  -Vince Lombardi

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve
the problems of the human race.
   -Calvin Coolidge

The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between
 his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body,
 his education and his recreation, his love and his religion.
He hardly knows which is which.
He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does,
 leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.
To him he is always doing both.
   -Zen Buddhist Text

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that
I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say,
'I used everything you gave me.'
   -Erma Bombeck

A hundred times every day, I remind myself that my inner and outer
life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I
must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.
  -Albert Einstein

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to
enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer
spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and
you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
   -Woodrow Wilson

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio
and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person
who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up,
has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put
him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

   -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist (1922-2007)

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games.
Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.
I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
   -Michael Jordan

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The trick is to have it at fifty.
   -Edgar Degas

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
   -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.
   -Igor Stravinsky, composer (1882-1971)

As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great
decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions
of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
   -Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)

The greatest reward for man's toil is not what one gets for it, but what one
becomes by it.
   -John Ruskin

The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
   -Chinese Proverb

Difficile est tenere quae acceperis nisi exerceas (It is difficult to
retain what you may have learned unless you should practice it)
   -Pliny the Younger (C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus)

Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.
   -Marcus Aurelius

Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
  No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats --
  approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
   -Emo Phillips

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.
   -Ludwig van Beethoven

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing;
education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
   -Will Durant

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
   -Confucius

If at first you don't succeed, try again.
Then quit.  No use being a damn fool about it.
   -W. C. Fields

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day;
wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
   -Elbert Hubbard, 1859-1915

It is better to have tried and failed than to have failed to try,
but the result's the same.
   -Mike Dennison

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is
the belief that one's work is terribly important.
   -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate

Do, or do not. There is no try.
   -Yoda, STAR WARS

I don't have to take this abuse from you ---
I have hundreds of people waiting in line to abuse me!
   -Bill Murray, Ghostbusters (movie)

Nothing will ever be attempted
if all possible objections must be first overcome.
   -Dr. Johnson

Anyone can do any amount of work provided
it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
   -Robert Benchley

He that lives in hope danceth without music.
   -George Herbert

My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general.
If you are a monk, you will become the Pope."
Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
   -Pablo Picasso

It is of no use saying, 'We are doing our best.'
You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
   -Winston Churchill

Nobody gets to run the mill by doing run-of-the-mill work.
   -Thomas J. Frye

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is
the power of lighting its own fire.
   -John W. Foster, clergyman (1770-1843)

Should you desire the great tranquility, be prepared to sweat white beads.
   -Hakuin

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
   -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who get the credit
   -Harry S Truman

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit.
Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.
   -Dwight Morrow

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.
   -James J. Ling

One idea that is carried out, that is given body and form, one idea that
assumes definite, tangible form and bears concrete results is worth a
million ideas that are born but to die.
   -Manual of the U.S. Army, 1911

There's plenty of room at the top, for those who are
willing to spend the time and effort climbing!

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold
weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
   -Leonardo Da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519)

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen,
few in pursuit of the goal.
   -Friedrich Nietzsche

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of
his earnings, and strictly honest, who complained of bad luck.
A good character, good habits, and iron industry are impregnable
to the assaults of all ill luck that fools ever dreamed of.
  -Joseph Addison

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of
hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo,
Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
   -H. Jackson Brown, Jr., writer

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
   -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

He who hoots with the owls at night ... will not soar with the eagles at dawn!

Success is just a matter of luck; just ask any failure.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
   -Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

We must believe in luck.
For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
   -Jean Cocteau

Opportunity is missed by most people because
it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
  -Thomas Edison

"This bad grade is lowering my self-esteem!"
"Then you should work harder so you don't get bad grades."
"Your denial of my victimhood is lowering my self-esteem!"
   -Calvin and Hobbes, by Watterson

SOMEBODY SAID THAT IT COULDN'T BE DONE
Anonymous
Somebody said that it couldn't be done--
But he, with a grin, replied,
He'd never be one to say it couldn't be done--
Leastways, not 'til he'd tried.
So he buckled right in, with a trace of a grin,
By golly, he went right to it!
He tackled The Thing That Couldn't Be Done!
And he couldn't do it.


ON SCIENCE, LEARNING, AND DISCOVERY

For in much wisdom is much grief, and
he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
   -Ecclesiastes 1:18

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom:
and with all thy getting get understanding.
   -Proverbs 4:7

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart
like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain
unfolding to success...
Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
   -Nikola Tesla, electrical engineer and inventor (1856-1943)

Each human being has the eternal duty of turning
what is hard and brutal into a tender and subtle offering,
what is crude into an object of refinement,
what is ugly into a thing of beauty, confrontation into collaboration,
ignorance into knowledge, hereby rediscovering the child's dream
of a creative reality incessantly renewed 
by death, the servant of life, and by life, the servant of love.
   -Yehudi Menuhin

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
   -Galileo Galilei

Keeping an open mind is a virtue -- but not so open that your brains fall out.
   -James Oberg, space engineer

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
   -Mohammed (570-632)

There is nothing new under the sun,
but there are lots of old things we don't know yet.
   -Ambrose Bierce

Many live in the ivory tower called reality;
they never venture on the open sea of thought.
   -Francois Gautier, journalist (1950- )

Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction.
   -Francis Picabia, painter and poet (1879-1953)

In 1817, when lecturing before a private society in London on the
element chlorine, Faraday thus expressed himself with reference to
this question of utility.  "Before leaving this subject, I will point
out the history of this substance, as an answer to those who are in
the habit of saying to every new fact, 'What is its use?'.
Dr. Franklin says to such, 'What is the use of an infant?' "
   -John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, NY, 1961

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
   -Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist (1825-1895)

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
   -Will Durant

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature
born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound
is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a
lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate
organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something
of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour
out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really
alive unless he is creating.
   -Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)

One's intelligence may march about and about a problem,
but the solution does not come gradually into view.
One moment it is not. The next it is there.
   -William Golding, Rites of Passage

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
   -Oliver Wendell Holmes

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and lastly die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
   -Robert Heinlein

If a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or
philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider.
   -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but
when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.
   -Voltaire

There is nothing so irritating as
somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
   -Don Herold

What is a highbrow?  He is a man who has found
something more interesting than women.
   -attrib. Edgar Wallace and others

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics
students in the third or fourth year of graduate school...
It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't
understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it...
That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
   -Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
    QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, (London, 1990)

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.  They really
do it.  It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens every day.  I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
   -Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

A science is any discipline in which a fool of this generation
can go beyond the point reached by a genius of the last generation.
   -Max Gluckman

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and
I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist.
This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
   -Matt Cartmill, anthropology professor and author (1943- )

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
   -Wernher von Braun

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
   -Linus Pauling

Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an
enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote
their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do
not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a
well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient
means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care
and freely consecrated to research.
   -Marie Curie, scientist, Nobel laureate (1867-1934)

Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known.
   -Isaac Asimov

Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.
   -Edward Tryon

The universe is full of magical things,
patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
   -Eden Phillpots

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
   -Bertrand Russell

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has...
powerful muscles, but no personality.
   -Albert Einstein

People demand freedom of speech
to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
   -Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the
'social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
   -Ernest Rutherford

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
But, in practice, there is.
   -Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about,
a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.
   -Sir Alan Herbert

It's not the things you don't know what gets you into trouble.
It's the things you do know that just ain't so.
   -Will Rogers

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
   -Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism", Part ii. Line 15.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God,
has to write off an experiment.
   -P. D. James (b. 1920), British mystery writer

There's an old Sufi story about the ancient sage who dies, and finds
himself at the gates of Paradise. St. Peter (or whoever it is) meets him
at the door, and says "Ah, I see you've arrived. We'd be happy to admit
you, if you will just answer one question: what have you done in your
life to deserve admission to Paradise." The sage said, "Oh, of course.
But before I do, can you answer me one question: how do I know that this
is really paradise, and not just the last desperate fantasy of a dying
brain in a dead body?" And before St Peter can answer, a great booming
voice from inside calls out "Let him in!  He's one of us!"
   (via John Lockhart)

If I'd known computer science was going to be like this,
I'd never have given up being a rock 'n' roll star.
   -G. Hirst

We have not succeeded in answering all our problems.
The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions.
In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are
confused on a higher level, and about more important things.
  -Bernt Oksendal, in "Stochastic Differential Equations"

While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane,
d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really
fundamental and important facts of the universe.
  -Terry Pratchett, in "Equal Rites"


ON MATHEMATICS (see also the Mathematics Quotation Server,
   http://math.furman.edu/~mwoodard/mquot.html
and  Wikipedia:  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics )

Math class is tough.
   -Barbie's 1992 voice chip by Mattell
    (See "200% of Nothing" by A. K. Dewdney, introduction to chapter 10)

Your Grace, there is no royal road to mathematics.
   -Maenaechmos (Alexander the Great's math tutor, answering "Why is math so hard?")

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that
they might escape the lusts of the flesh.
   -Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in
sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.
   -Leonardo Da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519)

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
   -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who
make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the
mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the
spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.
   -St. Augustine (354-430)

Mark all Mathematical heads which be wholly and only bent on these sciences,
how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with other,
how unapt to serve the world.
   -Roger Ascham (ca. 1550)

As for your problems... I am so tired of mathematics and hold it in such
low regard, that I could no longer take the trouble to solve them myself.
   -Descartes to Mersenne

Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each
other without consideration of their relation to experience.
   -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... 
is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.
   -N. Wiener

[Not enough is known about solid geometry] and for two reasons:
in the first place, no government places value on it; this leads
to a lack of energy in the pursuit of it, and it is difficult.
In the second place, students cannot learn it unless they have a teacher.
But then a teacher can hardly be found....
   -Plato, writing around 380BC in The Republic

At a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating,
is it not desirable that some, who can, dream ?
   -Rene Thom, mathematician

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across
a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty of nature. ...
if you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature,
it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
   -Richard Feynman

Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences. ...
Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is
ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world.
And what is worse, men who are thus ignorant are unable
to perceive their own ignorance and so do not seek a remedy.
   -Roger Bacon (Opus Majus, bk. 1, ch. 4) <http://bit.ly/dzjbWv>

The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some
training in philosophy.  He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be
somewhere else -- one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.
   -John Steinbeck, in "Travels with Charley"

The reason we have a maths department is because it would be
uneconomical to have that many people institutionalized.
   -Koko Martin Sama

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
   -Rev. Sydney Smith, letter to young lady, 22 July 1835

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy
one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb,
in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
   -Bertrand Russell

And of course a great deal of the rambling palace of mathematical
theory is built in the first place as ramshackle housing for physicists,
and only later subjected to Bourbaki-style interior decoration.
   -Michael L. Siemon

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes,
bathe and not make messes in the house.
   -Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not
place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.
   -Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911), U.S. sculptor
   [Quoted in Lives and Works, by Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson (1981)]

I am exclusively occupied with the problem of gravitation and hope
with the help of a local mathematician friend [Marcel Grossman] to
overcome all the difficulties. One thing is certain, however, that
never in life have I been quite so tormented. A great respect for
mathematics has been instilled within me, the subtler aspects of
which, in my stupidity, I regarded until now as pure luxury.
   -Albert Einstein
   -http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/GenRel/GenRel.html

You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark.
You stumble around bumping into the furniture but gradually you learn
where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you
find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated.
You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room
and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs,
while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two,
they are the culmination of, and couldn't exist without,
the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them.
   -Andrew Wiles

Mathematics contains much that will neither
hurt one if one does not know it nor help one if one does know it.
   -J.B. Mencken

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra.
In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
   -Fran Lebowitz (1946- ; American writer)

A career in mathematics is the scholastic equivalent of [the] Vietnam War.
   -From the sig of Jake Kesinger

Chaos Theory is a new theory invented by scientists panicked by the
thought that the public were beginning to understand the old ones.
   -Mike Barfield

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need
not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
   -George Berkeley, 1734

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent'
and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.
[Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be
afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if
they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.
Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake;
the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.]
   -Christopher Hitchens, author and journalist (1949-2011)

Love is like Pi: natural, irrational, and very important.
   -Lisa Hoffman

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
but that's not why we do it.
   -Richard Feynman

Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad,
and theology makes them sinful.
   -Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Fast cars, fast women, fast algorithms... what more could a man want?
   -Joe Mattis

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things,
you just get used to them.
   -John von Neumann (1903-1957, Hungarian/US mathematician and scientist)

Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young,
not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
   -Plato (c.428-347 B.C)

The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average
(mean) number of legs.

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number.
But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit!
We used to call them astronomical numbers.
Now we should call them economical numbers.
   -Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

My geometry teacher was sometimes acute, and sometimes obtuse, but always,
always, he was right.
   [That's an interesting angle.  I wonder if there are any parallels?]

Scorpio: (Oct. 24-Nov. 21)
 You will soon experience a mystical transformation
 into a higher form of pure, ultimate consciousness,
 but you still won't be a "math person."
   -http://www.theonion.com/onion3826/horoscopes_3826.html

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.
That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that
in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next
November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three
hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico
like a fishing rod.  And by the same token any person can see that
seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will
be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will
have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably under
a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.  There is something
fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesome returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
   -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of
the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like
playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on
the other.  The scientists wince at the discordances, covering their
ears as they silently sight-sing along with the written score.
   -George Johnson, reviewing "On Skinning Schrodinger's Cat"
    (NYTimes 1996-06-02 Section 4, p.16)

I heave the basketball; I know it sails in a parabola,
exhibiting perfect symmetry, which is interrupted by the basket.
It's funny, but it is always interrupted by the basket.
   -Michael Jordan (former Chicago Bull)

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.
I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic:
I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
   -G. K. Chesterton,  Orthodoxy ch. 2.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
   -Walt Whitman, poet (1819-1892) 
[The same is as true of mathematicians as of poets...]

I remember, too, how, in like manner, when a very young professor,
fresh from the University of Cambridge, in the act of teaching a
private pupil the simpler parts of Algebra, I discovered the principle
now generally adopted into the higher text books, which goes by the
name of the "Dialytic Method of Elimination." So much for the reaction
of the student on the teacher. May the time never come when the two
offices of teaching and researching shall be sundered in this University!
So long as man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut
himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what
he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions
seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral
nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual
replenishment.
   I should be sorry to suppose that I was to be left for long in sole
possession of so vast a field as is occupied by modern mathematics.
Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between
brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is
not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession,
but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a
soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive
harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped
out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it
finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite
as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the
astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within
assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent
validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in
each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell,
and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and
animal existence.
   -James Joseph Sylvester; in "The Collected Mathematical Papers of
    James Joseph Sylvester, volume III, pages 77-78, Address on
    Commemoration Day at Johns Hopkins University 22 February, 1877.
    [Copied from the web page of Michael Somos]

What is mathematics? Here is a quote I like:
   "Mathematics is the part of science you could continue to do
    if you woke up tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone."
I am often asked about this quote because it is frequently attributed to me;
indeed, I had it on my web pages since about 1995. Here is proof from 1998:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206105923/www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/tour.html
    My recollection is that I was tweaking something I had heard from someone
else, and John Baez seems like a likely source since he and I were both
participating in an online forum about mathematics, and he is interested
in the physical universe. It is quite possible, then, that my source for
the quote is from Baez's response to this message from James Dolan in 1994:
    "math is anything you could still be interested in if you woke up
    tomorrow and the universe was gone."
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/e923041326058518
  However, I have also seen such a statement attributed to Bertrand Russell.
That would not be out of character for Russell, and certainly it would then
predate these uses of the quote. However, like the many quotes attributed
to Abraham Lincoln or Will Rodgers, it is possible that this was a
mis-remembered source that simply sounded good to someone at the time.
  I would very much appreciate any further references to this, as the
question of the source of this quote arises repeatedly.
  It should of course be "...were gone".



ON TECHNOLOGY

Men have become the tools of their tools.
   -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to
supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those
senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more
unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail
to use those which nature has provided every one of us."
   -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile"

During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of
technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need
for character in the individual or the ability to think.
   -Bernard M. Baruch

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't
have to experience it.
   -Max Frisch

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control
over everything, except over technology.
   -John Tudor

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing;
but most of the time, we aren't either.
   -Marvin Minsky

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual --
not how to use it but why, when and for what.
   -Alan Kay

Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
   -Pablo Picasso

Bradley's Bromide:
      If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
      committee -- that will do them in.

When it is not _necessary_ to change, it is necessary _not_ to change.
   -Lucius Cary, c1610-1643, English royalist, "A Speech Concerning Episcopacy"



ON COMMITTEES

Bradley's Bromide:
      If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
      committee -- that will do them in.

What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit,
to do the unnecessary.
   -Richard Harkness in the New York Times, 1960

Football exemplifies the worst features of American life:
it's violence punctuated by committee meetings.
   -George Will

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.
   -Lazarus Long

A camel is a horse designed by committee;
a brontosaurus is a salamander designed to Mil-Spec.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing,
but together can decide that nothing can be done.
   -Fred Allen

When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting,
it has been a lousy meeting.
   -Herbert Hoover

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
   -Arthur Bloch

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies,
scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom.
   -Parkinson

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured
and then quietly strangled.
   -Barnett Cocks

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies,
scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom.
   -Parkinson

A strong conviction that something must be done
is the parent of many bad measures.
   -Daniel Webster

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
   -Wernher von Braun

You will always get the greatest recognition for the job you least like.

Since it is generally impossible to measure what is important, bureaucrats
instead turn their energies toward making important what is measurable.
   -Gordon D. Pusch

Any bureaucracy reorganized to enhance efficiency is indistinguishable
from its predecessor.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
   -Douglas Adams



ON STUPIDITY (See also 'COMMITTEES' :-) )

Hanlon's Razor:
    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens.
(Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.)
   -Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

Stupidity, like hydrogen, is one of the basic building blocks of the Universe.
   -Frank Zappa, during an explanation of why the New York Times
                 refused to carry advertising for his new movie.

There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded
by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
   -Gene Wolfe, _The Citadel of the Autarch_

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
   -Albert Einstein

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
   -Elbert Hubbard

Ignorance is a renewable resource.
   -P.J. O'Rourke

I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
   -Alexandre Dumas the younger (1824-1895)

It is better to keep your mouth shut and to appear stupid
than to open it and remove all doubt.
   -Mark Twain

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do
and always a clever thing to say.
   -Will Durant

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise:
and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
   -Proverbs 17:28

Wise men talk because they have something to say;
fools talk because they have to say something.
   -Plato

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
   -Robert Benchley

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
   -Bertrand Russell

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
(Whereof one cannot define, thereof one must be silent.)
   -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

When all is said and done, as a rule, more is said than done.
   -Lou Holtz

I feel that if a person can't communicate,
the very least he can do is shut up.
   -Tom Lehrer

A closed mouth gathers no feet.

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be
taken seriously.
   -Hubert H. Humphrey

Light travels faster than sound.
That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
   -Anon

His ignorance is encyclopedic.
   -Abba Eban

A fool may be known by six things:
 anger, without cause;
 speech, without profit;
 change, without progress;
 inquiry, without object;
 putting trust in a stranger, and
 mistaking foes for friends.
   -Arabian Proverb

A Ph.D. is not an innoculation against stupidity.
   -Prof. Robert L. Park, Ph.D.

He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving "normally."
   -Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

A pedant is one who would argue the difference between an idiot
and a moron at sufficient length to prove to be both.
   -Ben Tilly

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
   -Fred Allen

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain
insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a
hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
   -G. C. Lichtenberg

People think it's fun being a super genius but they don't realize how
hard it is to put up with all the real idiots in the world.
   -Calvin & Hobbes

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because
it's unfamiliar territory !

The difference between smart people and dumb people isn't
that smart people don't make mistakes.
They just don't keep making the same mistake over and over again!

Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day.
Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
   -Elbert Hubbard, author, editor, printer (1856-1915)

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience.
And then there is California.
   -Edward Abbey

Nobody, however learned, however wise, can stand in the way of regress.
   -John Le Carre

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
   -sign outside a Berkeley math professor's door some years ago

I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the
television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
   -Alice Walker, writer (1944- )

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical
adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and
drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in
the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react.
You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't
need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally.
Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And
if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly
on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a
television set.
   -Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888-1959)

No sane man will dance.
   -Marcus Tullius Cicero

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
   -George Bernard Shaw



ON LIFE AND VIRTUE

The flow of life:
   Nipples, dimples, knuckles, nickels, wrinkles, pimples.

Simplicity is always a virtue.
   -Edward Abbey

My greatest skill has been to want but little.
  -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

Beware the fury of the patient man.
   -John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you
if you could know how seldom they do.
   -Olin Miller

You can't do anything about the length of your life,
but you can do something about its width and depth.
   -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that
you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.
  -Mark Twain

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
   -Sydney J. Harris

A man has to live with himself,
and he should see to it that he always has good company.
   -Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens?
A terrible thing: no one to blame.
   -Erica Jong, writer (1942- )

If everything is under control, you are going too slow.
   -Mario Andretti

He who postpones the hour of living is like
the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
   -Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
   -George Bernard Shaw

The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
   -Sean O'Casey

If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.
   -Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long
at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
   -Helen Keller, author and lecturer (1880-1968)

Treat every person with kindness and respect, even those who are rude to you.
Remember that you show compassion to others not because of who THEY are
but because of who YOU are.
   -Andrew T. Somers

Be civil to all, sociable to many,
familiar with few, friend to one, enemy to none.
   -Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)

I speak to everyone in the same way,
whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.
   -Albert Einstein

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
   -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart;
a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.
   -Disraeli

It is possible that blondes also prefer gentlemen.
   -Mamie Van Doren

Blushing is the color of virtue.
   -Diogenes

Virtue is the only true nobility.
   -Thomas Fuller

A homely face and no figure have aided many women heavenward.
   -Minna Antrim

Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume.
   -French proverb

When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms,
the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven,
and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.
   -Akhenaton (c. B.C. 1375)

Of all the benefits which virtue confers on us,
the contempt of death is one of the greatest.
   -Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
   -Horace Mann

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is 
to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. 
There was a time when you were not: that gives us no concern.
Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
To die is only to be as we were before we were born.
   -William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life.
So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
   -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts
and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
   -Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil
deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us
and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
heart of every human being.
   -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty,
understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system.
And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness,
egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire
the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
   -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

Better keep yourself clean and bright.
You are the window through which you must see the world.
   -George Bernard Shaw

To practice five things under all circumstances
constitutes perfect virtue; these five are
gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.
   -Confucius

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes
that give our lives power and vividness and joy.
   -Richard Halloway

Besides  the noble art of getting things done,
there is the noble art of leaving things undone.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
   -Lin Yutang

Dignity consists not in possessing honors,
but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
   -Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as
you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
   -Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and
refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy,
not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;
to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions,
hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common -- this is my symphony.
   -William Henry Channing, clergyman, reformer (1810-1884)

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument
than why I have one.
   -Cato the Elder (234-149 BC)

As a day well spent brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
   -Leonardo da Vinci

Almost everything you do will be insignificant,
but it is very important that you do it.
   -Gandhi

When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced. Live your life
in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.
   -Indian Proverb

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
   -Maya Angelou

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.
   -Roger Miller, musician (1936-1992)

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
   -George Bernard Shaw

And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
   -William Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827)

The soul should always stand ajar. That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait, Or shy of troubling her.
   -Emily Dickinson

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion;
it is easy in solitude to live after our own;
but the great man is he who in the midst of the crown keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
   -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
   -Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.
Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
   -Tom Wilson

You know you're old when you've lost all your marvels.
   -Merry Browne

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you
looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.
   -Poul Anderson

Success is a journey, not a destination.

Cancer: (June 22-July 22)
You will belatedly realize you've become part of the problem when you
board a train that leaves Philadelphia at noon traveling 45 miles an hour.
   -http://www.theonion.com/

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all
right out, just as they are -- chaff and grain together -- certain that a
faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with
the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
   -George Eliot (pen name of MaryAnn Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant
I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.
Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
   -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)

Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the
expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase.
   -John Balguy

For money you can have everything it is said. No, that is not true.
You can buy food, but not appetite;  medicine, but not health;
soft beds, but not sleep;  knowledge but not intelligence;
glitter, but not comfort;  fun, but not pleasure;
acquaintances, but not friendship;  servants, but not faithfulness;
grey hair, but not honor;  quiet days, but not peace.
The shell of all things you can get for money.
But not the kernel. That cannot be had for money.
   -Arne Garborg, writer (1851-1924)



MISC. HUMOR

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
   -Heisenberg

To speak algebraically: Mr. Mathews is execrable but Mr. Channing is
(x+1)ecrable.
   -Edgar Allen Poe, describing two writers.
     quoted in Clifton Fadiman's "Fantasia Mathematica",

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract.
No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
   -Maybe Steven Wright?

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is
to look beyond, into the impossible!

The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps!

Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all...."
   -Thomas J. Kopp

Sometimes I get the feeling that the whole world is against me,
but deep down I know that's not true.
Some smaller countries are neutral.
   -Robert Orben

Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well-rested wimps, but wimps nonetheless.
   -Gary "Wolf" Barnes, in alt.sysadmin.recovery

http://www.jokes2go.com/quotes/60.html


When I see an adult on a bicycle,
I do not despair for the future of the human race.
   -H.G. Wells

The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands
and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it
and get a new one without shocking the entire community.
   -Ann Strong, _Minneapolis_Tribune_, 1895

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of
transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
   -Iris Murdoch, writer (1919-1999)

My favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles.
They both move people forward without wasting anything.
The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.
   -Peter Golkin, museum spokesman (1966- )


When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
  -Charles Merrill Smith

True friends stab you in the front.
  -Oscar Wilde

Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
  -Anon

Feelings are not supposed to be logical.
Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.
  -David Borenstein

The walls we build around us to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy.
  -Jim Rohn

Certain passages in several laws have always defied interpretation and
the most inexplicable must be a matter of opinion.  A judge of the
Court of Session of Scotland has sent the editors of this book his
candidate which reads, "In the Nuts (unground), (other than ground
nuts) Order, the expression nuts shall have reference to such nuts,
other than ground nuts, as would but for this amending Order not
qualify as nuts (unground) (other than ground nuts) by reason of their
being nuts (unground)."
  -Guiness Book of World Records, 1973

My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot.
Reports of my being alive and well have been grossly exaggerated.
I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.
  -Three epigrams of Ashleigh Brilliant

It's not the most intellectual job in the world,
but I do have to know the letters.
  -Vanna White

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. 
It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. 
We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
  -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate 


Best of all is never to have been born.  Second best is to die soon.