===== Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it. Henry David Thoreau Journal, Feb. 3, 1860 ===== All work is empty save when there is love. Kahlil Gibran "On Work," The Prophet (1923) ===== Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. Joseph Conrad Prologue to Part 1, Under Western Eyes (1911) ===== The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress. Joseph Joubert PensŽes (1842), tr. Katharine Lyttelton ===== A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations. Oliver Wendell Holmes The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) ===== Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any. George Santayana Little Essays (1920) ===== To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Albert Camus Notebooks, 1935-1942 (1962) ===== Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings (1954) ===== Responsibility, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star. Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1911) ===== You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. Mark Twain Notebook (1935) ===== Who begins too much accomplishes little. German proverb ===== Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. H. L. Mencken Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924) ===== Somewhere in my education I was misled to believe that science fiction and science fact must be kept rigorously separate. In practice they are so blurred together that they are practically one intellectual activity, although the results are published differently, one kind of journal for careful scientific reporting, another kind for wicked speculation. Marvin Minsky Quoted in Brand, Stewart, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), ch. 11 ===== People will not pay for quality of information. A trivial phone call costs exactly the same as an important one. Good books cost no more than bad books. A carefully read newspaper costs exactly the same as one consigned directly to the bottom of the birdcage. The finest new TV drama from the BBC costs the same as a re-re-run soap opera (nothing). In none of these can you get your money back if you're unhappy: producers won't pay for quality of information either. ... People won't pay for the quality of information, because the valuing is retroactive, but they will pay for quality of source, because the constancy (reliability) of source makes value somewhat predictable. Stewart Brand The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), ch. 11 ===== Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombineÑtoo cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. Stewart Brand The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), ch. 11 ===== Computation should be like electricity. You plug it into the wall and use as much of it as you need whenever you need it. Daniel Hillis - designer of the Connection Machine Quoted in Brand, Stewart, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), ch. 10 ===== The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. Joseph Joubert ===== Opinion is a medium between knowledge and ignorance. Plato ===== Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves. Franois, duc de La Rouchefoucauld ===== One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe. S. T. Coleridge ===== Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is, or should be, an inventor. Ralph Waldo Emerson ===== Nothing is more free than the imagination of man. David Hume ===== To use books rightly is to go to them for help. John Ruskin ===== Too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of ours, is as mere zero to Should, and, for most part, the smallest of fractions to Shall. Thomas Carlyle ===== There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin', an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; an' keepin' your face i' smilin' order, like a grocer o' market-day. George Eliot ===== Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them. W. R. Inge ===== I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Thomas Carlyle ===== Let the people think they govern and they will be governed. William Penn ===== Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. Oscar Wilde ===== What is written is merely the dregs of experience. Franz Kafka ===== A man's library is a sort of harem. Ralph Waldo Emerson ===== When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: 'My dear, we live in an age of transition.' W. R. Inge ===== -A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it. Herbert Spencer ===== There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place. Washington Irving ===== In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Carl Jung ===== Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. Henry Miller ===== Youth is a wonderful thing; what a crime to waste it on children. George Bernard Shaw ===== If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== When all think alike, then no one is thinking. Walter Lippmann ===== What can be done at any time will be done at no time. Thomas Fuller Gnomologia (1732), no. 5500 ===== If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one. John Galsworthy Swan Song (1928), part II, ch. 6 ===== It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. Horace Epodes IV (13 B.C.), stanza XII, line 27 ===== The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few but information in the hands of many. John Naisbitt Megatrends (1984), ch. 1 ===== No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First Series (1841), "Circles" ===== The difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time. Arthur Schopenhauer ===== Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. William Hazlitt ===== The mind is always the dupe of the heart. [L'esprit est toujours la dupe du cÏur.] Michel de Montaigne ===== Empirical sciences prosecuted simply for their own sake, and without a philosophic tendency, resemble a face without eyes. Arthur Schopenhauer ===== Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Rudyard Kipling ===== Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. John Maynard Keynes ===== Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke ===== Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. Carl Sandburg ===== We like to be deceived. [Nous aimons ˆ tre trompŽs.] Blaise Pascal ===== I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain ===== I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. Aldous Huxley ===== I'm sick of reasonable people: they see all the reasons for being lazy and doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw Geneva Said by The Secretary ===== I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. George Bernard Shaw ===== When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. Anatole France ===== We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source. Clifton Fadiman ===== The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations. Benjamin Disraeli ===== the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. John Stuart Mill ===== Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. Oscar Wilde ===== There are two kinds of fools; one says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better'. W. R. Inge ===== Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured. Ambrose Bierce ===== It is repectable to have no illusions Ð and safe Ð===== and profitable, and dull. Joseph Conrad ===== ~The important thing is not to know more than all men, but to know more at each moment than any particular man. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world. William Shenstone ===== ^Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologise for a lack of decent clothing. Nathaniel Hawthorne ===== The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. William Blake ===== You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker T. Washington ===== The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. James Branch Cabell ===== The passions are the only orators which always persuade. Franois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld ===== Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Ralph Waldo Emerson ===== The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way. Josh Billings ===== We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself. Samuel Butler ===== A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support. Ambrose Bierce ===== The meaning of life is that it stops. Franz Kafka ===== It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. Voltaire ===== You are obliged to your imagination for three-fourths of your importance. David Garrick ===== Reality surpasses imagination; and we see breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of dreams. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Our present time is indeed a criticising and a critical time, hovering between the wish and the inability to believe. Jean Paul ===== Originality is simply a fresh pair of eyes. T. W. Higginson ===== Nothing is thoroughly approved but mediocrity. The majority has established this, and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way. Blaise Pascal ===== Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure; emotion is easily propagated from the writer to the reader. Joseph Joubert ===== Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted. William Hazlitt "On Pedantry," The Round Table (1817) ===== The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it. C. P. Snow ===== Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own. Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot (1984), ch. 13 ===== A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. Samuel Butler "Higgledy-Piggledly,"Notebooks (1912) ===== Life is a horizontal fall. [Vivre est une chute horizontale.] Jean Cocteau Opium (1930), p. 37 ===== Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. Cyril Connolly Unquiet Grave (1944), pt. 3 ===== How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sign of Four (1890), ch. 6 ===== It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Study in Scarlet (1888), ch. 5 ===== A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), "Five Orange Pips" ===== You see, but you do not observe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), "Scandal in Bohemia" ===== Where do our notions of mind come from if not generated by our tools?... It takes some digging to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet upon which experience is written. ...And yet such digging beomes easier if we start with the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes far beyond the function of the thing itself. The invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) ===== Two people must first contradict each other if they really wish to understand each other. Truth is the child of argument, not of fond affinity. Gaston Bachelard La Philosophie du non (1940) ===== Ancora imparo. I am still learning. Michelangelo Motto ===== The majority never had right on its side. Never, I say. Intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitutes the majority of the population of the country? Is it the wise folk or the fools?...The stupid people are an overwhelming majority all over the world. The majority has might on its sideÑunfortunately; but right it has not... The minority is always in the right. Henrik Ibsen An Enemy of the People (1882) ===== With few exceptions girls have been educated to be drudges, or toys, beneath men; or a sort of angel above him...The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint or the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than the male, but only weaker; that women are meant neither to be men's guardians nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellow and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bars to the equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls. T. H. Huxley EmancipationÑBlack and White (1865) ===== To know, to think, to dream. That is everything. [Savoir, penser, rver. Tout est lˆ.] Victor Hugo Les Ch‰timents (1853) ===== that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful. Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) ===== I think the proverb above quotedÑ(in medio tutissimus ibis; thou will go most safely by taking the middle course)Ñis one of the most mischievous, one of the most pernicious, one of the most foolish that ever was invented in the world. I believe very strongly in extremes; am I am quite sure that all progress in the world, whether literary, or scientific, or religious, or political, or social, has been obtained only with the assistance of extremes. Lafcadio Hearn Lecture, University of Tokyo ===== The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of Seven Gables (1851) ===== To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing). Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) ===== Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. Samuel Butler Note-Books ===== Art was made to disturb, science reassures. Georges Braque PensŽes sur l' Art ===== Marriage should war incessantly with that monster that is the ruin of everything. This is the monster of habit. HonorŽ de Balzac The Physiology of Marriage (1830) ===== We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die. W. H. Auden The Age of Anxiety (1948), epilogue ===== The wise learn many things from their foes. Aristophanes, The Birds (414 B.C.) ===== He who would prove all life, leaves it empty. To know the way of everything is to be left with the geometry of things and with the substance of nothing. To reduce the world to an equation is to leave it without head or feet. Leopoldo Alas Y Ure–a ("Clarin") The Cock of Socrates (1901) ===== Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite. Edward Albee Ð quoted in The Saturday Review, May 4, 1966 ===== ^Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed in the world, forsomuch as men have established them without their consent. Michael de Montaigne Essays, Book III, ch. 5 ===== ^The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being. George William Curtis Contribution, Harper's, September 1886 ===== (pity this busy monster, manunkind, not.) Progress is a comfortable disease. e. e. cummings One Times One (1944) ===== Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. Joseph Conrad Victory (1915) ===== love was the only dirty trick that nature played on us to achieve the continuation of species. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938) ===== Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung Collected Works (1954) ===== If you truly wished to find out what is best for the country you would listen more to those who oppose you than to those who try to please you. Isocrates Quoted in Edith Hamilton, The Echo of Greece ===== I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889), ch. 15 ===== Every thought is an exception to the general rule that people do not think. Paul ValŽry Mauvaises PensŽes et Autres (1941) ===== There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up. Rex Stout Death of a Doxy (1966) ===== A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. Oscar Wilde Oscariana, 1911 ===== ,The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep from habit, near neighbor to annihilation. Miguel de Unamuno The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913, ch. 9 ===== So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. Peter Drucker ===== Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Alduous Huxley A narrow convention as to learning, and as to the procedures of institutions connected with it, has developed. Thus, to a really learned man, matter exists in test tubes, animals in cages, art in museums, religion in churches, knowledge in libraries. Alfred North Whitehead "Harvard: The Future", Atlantic Monthly, vol. 158 ===== The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society. Alfred North Whitehead Process and Reality, 1929 ===== The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. Alfred North Whitehead Modes of Thought, 1938 ===== Man is many thingsÑhe is protean, elusive, capable of great good and appalling evil. He is what he is ... a reservoir of indeterminism. He represents the genuine triumph of volition, life's near evasion of the forces that have molded it. Loren Eiseley Darwin's Century ===== The role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. Henri Bergson [quoted in Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century, ch. 12] ===== There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker ===== When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. C. P. Snow ===== New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, dedicatory epistle ===== Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. Franois, Duc de La Rouchefoucauld Reflections; or, Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1665, maxim 375 ===== Genius seems to consist in the power of applying the originality of youth to the experience of maturity. Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, 1959 ===== Panic of error is the death of progress. Alfred North Whitehead ===== Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit. JosŽ Marti, "Granos de Oro" (published posthumously, 1942) ===== _It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others. Michel de Montaigne ===== A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Samuel Butler ===== One always has time enough if one will apply it well. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford, vol. 2, book 10, p. 16 (1974). ===== No brain is stronger than its weakest think. Thomas L. Masson, Laughs, p. 167 (1926) ===== The secret of success is constancy of purpose. Benjamin Disraeli, speech at the banquet of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, Crystal Palace, London, June 24, 1872. In T.E. Kebbel (ed.), Selected Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 2, p.535 (1882). ===== You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?" George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, act I Note: The serpent says these words to Eve. ===== Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. William Cowper, The Task, 1785, pt. IV, "Winter Walk at Noon," line 96 ===== Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humor is provided to console him for what he is. Horace Walpole, quoted by Roger von Oech, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, 1986, "The Artist" ===== it is the illusion of knowledge. Daniel J. Boorstin, in Washington Post, Jan. 29, 1984 ===== Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. C. Northcote Parkinson Parkinson's Law (1962) ===== Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First Series, 1841, "Circles" ===== statistically speaking the most powerful. Hannah Arendt, New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1977 ===== A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: Second Series, 1844, "Character" ===== Come not between the dragon and his wrath. William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1606 Act I, scene i, line 124 ===== One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ===== The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. G. K. Chesterton ===== If you can't convince them, confuse them. Harry S. Truman ===== WORDS I don't take your words Merely as words. Far from it. I listen To what makes you talk-- Whatever that is-- And me listen. Shinkichi Takahashi ===== An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. [Intellectuel = celui qui se dŽdouble.] Albert Camus Carnets, 1935-42 (Notebooks, 1962), p. 41 ===== _In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books. Michel de Montaigne ===== My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. Robert Maynard Hutchins ===== All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. Aristotle ===== The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. Sydney J. Harris ===== The world is governed more by appearance than by realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as it is to know it. Daniel Webster ===== Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance. Robert Quillen ===== ~To the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name knowledge. Ambrose Bierce ===== Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. Will Rogers ===== Invention is the mother of neccesity. Thorstein Veblen ===== Circumstances? I make circumstances! Napoleon Bonaparte ===== {Be not angry that you cannot make others what you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself what you wish to be. Thomas ˆ Kempis ===== When a man versed in his subject treats any topic lovingly and thoroughly, he gives us a share in his interest, and forces us to enter into the topic. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. Charles Babbage ===== A man's errors are what make him amiable. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill-prepared for making discoveries; they also make poor observations. Claude Bernard (1813-1878) ===== Statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital. Anonymous (1986) ===== It is always better to say right out what you think without trying to prove anything much: for all our proofs are only variations of our opinions, and the contrary-minded listen neither to one nor the other. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes. Karl R. Popper ===== "Business is finally recognizing that division of labor is increasingly ineffective as the basis for an organization in an environment of constant rather than occasional change.... Management control is replaced by management coordination of the work of others who may know more than the manager, and decision making occurs in the team rather than in the hierarchy." --Peter G.W. Keen, Shaping the Future: Business Design Through Information Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 1991 ===== Tell me what you desire, and I will tell you what you are. Henri FrŽdŽric Amiel Intimate Journal ===== Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Mark Twain Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), ch. 19 ===== Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. Mark Twain Following the Equator (1897), ch. 28 ===== All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. Mark Twain Letter to Mrs Foote, 2 Dec. 1887, in B. DeCasseres, When Huck Finn Went Highbrow (1934), p. 7 ===== The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again. John Locke Letter to Samuel Bold, May 16, 1699 ===== Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. Michelangelo ===== The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money. Thomas Jefferson ===== Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Henry David Thoreau ===== A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return. Francis Bacon ===== For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes. [Quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id potius credit.] Francis Bacon Novum Oganum, bk.I, Aphor.49 ===== A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. Francis Bacon ===== We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. Sherlock Holmes (Sir Conan Doyle) ===== efficiency is a minimum condition for survival after success has been achieved. Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. Peter Drucker Management: Tasks, Responsibilites, Practices, p. 45 ===== Human kind Cannot bear very much reality. T. S. Eliot Collected Poems (1936), "Burnt Norton" ===== The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. Marshall McLuhan Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) ===== Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. Ezra Pound ABC of Reading (1934), ch. 8 ===== The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) ===== Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. Paul ValŽry ===== The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Winston Churchill Speech at Harvard, Sept. 6, 1943, in Onwards to Victory (1944), p. 238 ===== A "political environment" is one in which "who" is more important than "what." Peter M. Senge The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization Ð p. 273 ===== The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible. Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929), ch. 5 ===== Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907), ch. 24 ===== Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907), ch. 1 ===== Be careful when you inform yourself about things. Much of our lives is spent gathering information. We see very few things for ourselves, and live trusting others. The ears are the back door of truth and the front door of deceit. Truth is more often seen than heard. Baltasar Graci‡n, The Art of Worldly Wisdom ===== Stupidity is without anxiety. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Opposition always enflames the enthusiast, never converts him. Schiller ===== Man, in so far as he acts on nature to change it, changes his own nature. Hegel ===== Language is a cracked kettle on which we tap out crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary ===== Our history is made up of the fact that every time we fulfill just a little of an idea, in our delight we leave the greater part of it undone. Magnificent institutions are usually bungled drafts of ideas. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities ===== He has the facts, but not the phosphorescence of learning. Emily Dickinson ===== as the fast horse of information outstrips the slow horse of meaning. Orrin Klapp Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society Greenwood Press, 1986 Contributions in Sociology, No. 57 ===== You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well-hammered yourself. George Bernard Shaw Getting Married ===== Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. H. H. Williams ===== Thinking is those mental processes we don't understand. Alan Turing ===== Learning leaves but one lesson: doubt. George Bernard Shaw ===== Reality is the name we give to those inferences that have become so habitual that we have forgotten they are only inferences. Robert Anton Wilson ===== It isn't the people you fire who make your life miserable, it's the people you don't. Harvey Mackay Swim with the Sharks ===== Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? Henry James Ambassadors (1903) bk. 5, ch. 11 ===== If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances. Albert Einstein Reporter, 18 Nov. 1954 ===== The end of man is an action, not a thought, though it were the noblest. Thomas Carlyle ===== Man is a tool-using animal; - without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. Thomas Carlyle ===== This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. . . the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. George Bernard Shaw Ñfrom the preface of Man and Superman ===== "Dal dire al fare c` e di mezzo il mare. [Between saying and doing there lies the ocean.] Italian proverb ===== Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his brain. Marshall McLuhan Playboy interview, 1968) ===== The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is an extension of our nervous system. Beside it the wheel is a mere hula-hoop. Marshall McLuhan ===== The cost of excellence is discipline. The price of mediocrity is disappointment. William A. Ward ===== The secret and the difference between winners and losers is in discipline. The winner manages his money. The loser lets the money manage him. Nicholas ("Nick the Greek") Dandalos ===== Seeking to know is only too often learning to doubt. Antoinette DeshouliŽres ===== ~Only when we know little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts. Bertrand Russell ===== What I can do - I will Though it be little as a Daffodil That I cannot - must be Unknown to possibility. Emily Dickinson ===== The Lump Law: If we want to learn anything, we mustn't try to learn everything. Gerald Weinberg Introduction to General Systems Thinking ===== No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850, ch. 20 ===== Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Thomas A. Edison ===== If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Henry David Thoreau ===== Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried. William Shakespeare ===== Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1605, act I, scene iv, line 78 ===== Make the most of time, it flies away so fast; yet method will teach you to win time. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== _Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. Michel de Montaigne ===== Nothing is really work unless you'd rather be doing something else. J. M. Barrie Peter Pan ===== Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. Abraham Lincoln ===== Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. Washington Irving ===== The love of money and the love of learning rarely meet. George Herbert "Jacula Prudentum" (published 1640) ===== Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. William James ===== If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau Walden ===== The modern age has a false sense of superiority, because of the great mass of data at its disposal. But the valid criterion of distinction is rather the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1810) ===== Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Alan Kay ===== o... an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes. Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks & Responsiblities, p. 488 ===== Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw ===== By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen about his ears. Thomas Carlyle ===== One often contradicts an opinion when what was uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed. Nietzsche ===== The mind becomes that which it contemplates. Shelley ===== What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. Henry David Thoreau Journal, 1850 ===== which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. ... We use semblences of logic until experience puts us in possession of real logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. Ralph Waldo Emerson "Poetry and Imagination" ===== The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. William James ===== The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. G. B. Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists ===== Only through submission to detestable duties does one gain a certain feeling of liberation which induces a creative mood. In the long run one cannot steal creation. Carl Jung ===== Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), ch. 16 ===== Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanisms of the Universe. Alfred North Whitehead Adventures of Ideas (1933), pt.1 , ch. 5 ===== We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde ===== "Know thyself?" If I knew myself, I'd run away. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Earthy minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though perhaps sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, and keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturb them. John Locke ===== In theory, it is easy to convince an ignorant person; in actual life, men not only object to offer themselves to be convinced, but halt the man who has convinced them. Epictetus ===== We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. Cyril Connolly The Unquiet Grave (1945) ===== Happiness can be defined as the state of being well-deceived. Lewis Lapham ===== I must impale myself on reality. Wallace Stevens ===== If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache. Ralph Waldo Emerson ===== Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Mark Twain ===== . . . mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight. Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet love - consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other. Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet ===== Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods. Neil Postman ===== ~It is not enough to know, one must also apply; it is not enough to will to try, one must also do. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== It is natural to a man to believe what he wishes to be true, and to believe it because he wishes it. Arthur Schopenhauer ===== +The real men of genius were resolute workers, not idle dreamers. G. H. Lewes ===== It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. Jonathan Swift ===== I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more. Jonas Salk ===== It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. W. Somerset Maugham ===== No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking. Voltaire ===== Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it. Leonardo da Vinci ===== People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the minds of others. Blaise Pascal ===== The best use one can make of his mind is to distrust it. Franois Fenelon ===== A man is only as good as the tool he uses. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== _HABIT, n. a shackle for the free. Ambrose Bierce ===== The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity. Oscar Wilde ===== The world is but a canvas to our imagination. Henry David Thoreau ===== In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. Mark Twain ===== Success is getting what you wish. Happiness is wishing what you get. Bertrand Russell ===== What is now proved was once only imagined. William Blake ===== Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald ===== People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. George Bernard Shaw Mrs. Warren's Profession [Vivie] ===== Any fool can know. The point is to understand. Albert Einstein ===== "What are you doing Zek?" asked Judge Webster to his eldest boy. "Nothing." "What are you doing, Daniel?" "Helping Zek." A tolerably correct account of most of our activity today. Ralph Waldo Emerson, October 1841 ===== Abuse is a proof that you are felt. If they praise you, you will work no revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1855 ===== Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers. William Penn, 1693 ===== If I should press these views on men strongly inclined to the contrary, how deaf would they be to it all! Stone deaf, no doubt - and no wonder! To tell the truth, it seems to me that you should not offer advice which you know will not be considered. What good could it do? How could such a bold discourse influence men whose minds are prepossessed and deeply imbued with contrary aims? Such academic philosophy is not unpleasant among friends in free conversation, but in the King's council, where official business is being carried on, there is no room for it. - Thomas More, Utopia (1551) ===== The thing to do with the future is not to forecast it, but to create it. The objective of planning should be to design a desirable future and to invent ways of bringing it about. Russell Ackoff Ackoff's Fables ===== In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ===== To know the world, one must construct it. Cesar Pavese You are where your viewpoint is. Eric Gullichsen (Sense8 Corporation) Ð a researcher/developer of virtual reality ===== Reality is not more fantastic than we think but more fantastic than we imagine. J. B. S. Haldane ===== Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ===== Reality is the thing on the other side of your senses. Jaron Lanier (VPL) Ð a researcher/developer of virtual reality ===== _To make anything a habit, do it; to not make it a habit, do not do it; to unmake a habit, do something else in place of it. Epictetus ===== Nonsense and beauty have close connections. E. M. Forster ===== Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. G. K. Chesterton ===== The future of work consists of learning a living (rather than earning a living) in the automation age ... as the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages. Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964) ===== All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") The Seven Pillars of Wisdom ===== Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload. Richard Saul Wurman What-If, Could-Be: An historical fable of the future (1976), p. 44 ===== In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. Ralph Waldo Emerson "Prudence," Essays: First Series (1841) ===== , >TF¤DHý³Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Ralph Waldo Emerson "Circles" ===== Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace; If not, by any means get wealth and place. Alexander Pope l.103 ===== Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions. Benjamin Disraeli Coningsby (1844), book iv, chapter 13 ===== No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First Series, 1841, "Circles" ===== ~Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. Samuel Johnson p.365. 18 Apr. 1775