Quotes

Through hardships to the stars
- NASA slogan

The only way to do something interesting is not care if you fail.
- Charlie Kaufman, director

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
- Steve Jobs

Well, official channels could take forever. I remember when I applied for
permission to get married. By the time the papers came through, my son was
divorced - Colonel Potter, MASH

Time wears away error and polishes truth.
- Gaston Pierre Marc, Duc deLevis, writer (1764-1830)

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart
you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
- Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged, the pilot 
is blameworthy, but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his 
voyage has been round the Globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.
- Thomas Carlyle

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself;
he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.
- Goethe

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
- T.S Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

Eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won't 
just take us, it'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, [Mozart], 
Buddy Holly, Aristophanes - all of this. All of this was for nothing, 
unless we go to the stars.
- Babylon 5

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
- Woody Allen

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone-cutter hammering away
at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in
it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it
was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together.
- Jacob A. Riis, journalist and social reformer (1849-1914)

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
- Albert Camus

Beauty is not in the face. It is a light in the heart.
- Khahlil Gibran

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your
hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them
as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
- Carl Schurz, general and politician (1829-1906)

If I were as rich as Rockerfeller, I'd be richer than Rockerfeller
How's that?
I'd do a bit of window cleaning on the side
- The two Ronnies

Einmal heisst keinmal und zweimal heisst immer (Once is never and twice is always).
- von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.
- Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

Genius is eternal patience.
- Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (1475-1564)

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries,
is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) - but 'That's funny...'
- Isaac Asimov

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are
permitted to remain children all our lives.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I have seen flowers come in stony places, and kind things done by men with ugly faces
and the Derby cup won by the worst horse at the races. So I trust, too.
- W.H. Auden?

All models are wrong. Some are useful.
- Source: Lemniscata 2

The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows
who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the
highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was
safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is
worth ten thousand syllogisms.
- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

I'm a great believer in luck
and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

If you can't decide what physics to do, invent some technology, because
that always leads to new physics.
- P.Blackett, Physicist.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox.
Now we have some hope of making progress!
- W.Heisenberg

It'll be dry in Rye, cool in Goule, choking in Woking
and if you live in Lissingdown, carry an umbrella".
- The Two Ronnies

Whatever in happening, causes itself to happen again, causes itself to 
happen again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order though.
- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless.

What is to give light must endure burning.
- Viktor Frankl

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

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.
- Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (1859-1930)

Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to 
live and not know. Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' 
I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. 
How you get to know is what I want to know."
- Richard Feynman

Genius in the art and sciences is the ability to hold an image in the mind.
- Artist on: Michaelangelo, BBC1, Feb 29th, 2004.

There is a pleasure sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know.
- John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I
meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,
I do not dare to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not.
- Joachim Miller

A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed--I well know.
For it is a sign that he has tried to surpass himself.
- Georges Clemenceau, French politician (1841-1929)

Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his
memory is too good.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, German philosopher (1844-1900)

You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.
- Johnny Cash

At a lecture on linguistics, the speaker suggested that in English there
wasn't the opposite of a double negative, whereby two affirmatives resulted
in a negative. Someone from the audience called out "Yeah, right!"
which brought down the house.
- Quoted in the Electronic AIR Newsletter

The words of truth are always paradoxical.
- Lao Tzu

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
- Anais Nin

Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, 
but rather must recognise that it is he that is asked.
- Viktor Frankl

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that
of an expert saying it can't be done.
- Peter Ustinov