“To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Letters and Recollections, 1980
Quotations
“Dare to Be Yourself”
Quotations from André Gide:
Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
Understanding is the beginning of approving.
The color of truth is gray.
At times it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin.
Only fools don’t contradict themselves.
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you.
It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labor of peace.
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling.
Our judgments about things vary according to the time left us to live — that we think is left us to live.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.
Unquote
“It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.” — Samuel Johnson
Unquote
“Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.” — Montaigne
Misc
- “Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.” — Swedish proverb
- Uranus was discovered before Antarctica.
- PROTECTORATE is a palindrome in Morse code.
- PUBLIC RELATIONS is an anagram of CRAP BUILT ON LIES.
- If you copy this sentence, be sure to omit “”.
(The fourth is due to Mick Tully, the fifth to David Armstrong.)
Unquote
“Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.” — William Gladstone
“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” — Thomas Macaulay
“Stray Sayings”
From George Bernard Shaw’s “Maxims for Revolutionists,” 1903:
We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good. What would he say now?
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind.
The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.
If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves.
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.
Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
Unquote
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
Relative
During an eclipse in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Albert Einstein’s prediction of the gravitational bending of light rays, upholding the general theory of relativity. That Christmas, Einstein wrote to his friend Heinrich Zangger in Zurich:
“With fame I become more and more stupid, which, of course, is a very common phenomenon. There is far too great a disproportion between what one is and what others think one is, or at least what they say they think one is. But one has to take it all with good humor.”
(From Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, eds., Albert Einstein, the Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives, 1979.)
Unquote
“To convince any man against his will is hard, but to please him against his will is justly pronounced by Dryden to be above the reach of human abilities.” — Samuel Johnson
“Thou canst not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may’st a Friend into an Enemy.” — Ben Franklin