Finding Solace in Favourite Quotes: Escaping Despair with Words of Wisdom

[Ivan Seeking]

that was actually Napoleon Hill, in his book "think and grow rich". he's the originator of a few other well-known quotes like that, such as "quitters never win and winners never quit"

Wow, I read that book but first heard it from an Amway guy.

Revolting book btw...

 

[sebas531]

"It's ok, I'm an engineer."-neighbor

 

[rcgldr]

the future is not fated

"The future is not set", Terminator 1 and 2 (movies).

 

[jimmie]

A true artist does not dwell upon art.

 

[Tsu]

"Julian Dicks is everywhere, it's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field."

- some World Cup commentator? See the I loathe football thread

 

[Ivan Seeking]

"Julian Dicks is everywhere, it's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field."

- some World Cup commentator? See the I loathe football thread

That's a keeper!

 

[Astronuc]

"Power without Love is reckless and abusive, and Love without Power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is Love implementing the demands of Justice, and Justice at its best is Power correcting everything that stands against Love."

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), speaking for the last time as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967.

from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., James Melvin Washington, James Washington (Editor) , Harper Collins, 1990.

 

[Evo]

The best quote is taken from a letter Pauli wrote to colleague George Gamow. Werner Heisenberg was another colleague of Pauli’s who spent a lot of time searching for the unified field theory. This, by the way, is a theory which unites quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, which can’t be done with our current knowledge. Anyway, Heisenberg announced to the press that he and Pauli had found the unified field theory, and only the technical details were missing. This infuriated Pauli, who wrote a letter to Gamow which ended with the following. “This is to show that I can paint like Titian.” (A big drawing of a rectangle) “Only the technical details are missing.”

 

[Garth]

"Power without Love is reckless and abusive, and Love without Power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is Love implementing the demands of Justice, and Justice at its best is Power correcting everything that stands against Love."

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), speaking for the last time as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967.

from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., James Melvin Washington, James Washington (Editor) , Harper Collins, 1990.

Thank you for that Astronuc - I will use it.

Garth

 

[fourier jr]

The best quote is taken from a letter Pauli wrote to colleague George Gamow. Werner Heisenberg was another colleague of Pauli’s who spent a lot of time searching for the unified field theory. This, by the way, is a theory which unites quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, which can’t be done with our current knowledge. Anyway, Heisenberg announced to the press that he and Pauli had found the unified field theory, and only the technical details were missing. This infuriated Pauli, who wrote a letter to Gamow which ended with the following. “This is to show that I can paint like Titian.” (A big drawing of a rectangle) “Only the technical details are missing.”

kind of reminds me of this one:
"You know, what Einstein has just said isn't so stupid."
Wolfgang Pauli commenting Einstein's lecture

 

[Astronuc]

"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." - James W. Loewen - from his book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"

I just found this in the house, and I have been reading Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States".

 

[Astronuc]

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

[Skyhunter]

The upper crust is just a bunch of crumbs held together by dough.

Written in black on a yellow VW bus I saw in the 80's.

 

[Astronuc]

Quote of the Day - posted on PHYS208 Fundamentals of Physics II
http://www.physics.udel.edu/~watson/phys208/quotes/quote22.html

The beauty of physics lies in the extent which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity.

Melvin Schwartz in Principles of Electrodynamics

Nice little discussion of the attributes of mass and electric charge.
http://www.physics.udel.edu/~watson/phys208/clas0211.html

 

[Kalimaa23]

"The Patrician is the role of leader of the largest city on the Discworld, Ankh Morpork, and Lord Havelock Vetinari is the Patrician. In a democratic society of One man, One vote, he is that Man and he has the Vote. "

 

[EL]

"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring"

-Feynman

 

[Gokul43201]

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?

-- George Wallace

 

[Astronuc]

A disclaimer -

The following information may have errors; It is not permissible to be used by anyone who has ever met a lawyer.

from an on-line source for units conversion.
http://xtronics.com/reference/convert.htm

 

[Ivan Seeking]

An old Inuit living near the north pole is interviewed in order to provide a qualitative description of the affects of arctic warming. After discussing the loss of ice, stranded polar bears, dead whales, and the end of a way of life, we get the following:

Inuit: ...but I like global warming.

Interviewer: Why?

Inuit: It's warmer!

 

[darius]

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. ) I am large, I contain multitudes."-Whitman

This is no book-who touches this, touches a man. Whitman

"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a cosmos."

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible-T. E. Lawrence

Another thing we do is fools ourselves
Becomes the dupes of logic which derives
Giant conclusions out of pygmy clues-Lucretius

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a string of capital truths, and ourselves for an oracle, is inborn in us- Paul Valerey

 

[mathwonk]

today the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of every individual subject in mathematics. herman weyl.

(what did you expect? physical humor?)

 

[mathwonk]

professorial humor:

student calling at midnight: "what was my exam grade?"

professor, groggily: "Your grade is F,...whats your name?"

 

[mathwonk]

"there are no bad whiskies, but some whiskies are better than others",
the honorable peshine smith, ambassador to japan, also attributed (much later) to william faulkner.

 

[mathwonk]

"If you wipe your rear end with your left hand, then you should eat with your right hand." hindu yogi.

 

[Astronuc]

I read this recently, but I don't know the author -

"God put me on this Earth to accomplish many things.

I am so far behind, I will never die."


There are times when it seems like that - every day brings one more thing to do, which invariably gets appended to the "to do List", where it must wait in the queue pending all the other things to do - eventually.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I may have posted these somewhere already, but oh well...

'Yeah, it is reminiscent of what distinguishes the good theorists from the bad ones. The good ones always make an even number of sign errors, and the bad ones always make an odd number.'"-Anthony Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

The class of all questions contains an infinite number of members (since it is possible to go on indefinitely adding clauses to create questions of indefinite length and complexity). But there are only a finite number of answered questions, so the ratio is 0:1. .
---- Charles Francis

----Corollary: we know nothing.---- Charles Francis

Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. - unknown

The reasonable person adapts to the world around him or her, while the unreasonable person tries to change the world to suit them. Conclusion: Change only occurs because of unreasonable people.

 

[darius]

Here is one that was in Eisenhower's office in the days he was some kind of Dean at Columbia University. In pig latin roughly "Don't let the bastards wear you down."

 

[Cyrus]

I saw this on a friends profile.

"Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed." -Richard Rhal; Sword of Truth (TotW)-

 

[fourier jr]

To invent is to choose. This very remarkable conclusion appears the more striking if we compare it with what Paul Valery writes in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise: "It takes two to invent anything. The one makes up combinations; the other chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of things which the former has imparted to him. What we call genius is much less the work of the first one than the readiness of the second one to grasp the value of what has been laid before him and to choose it."
Jacques Hadamard

All of life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilise my activities, my capacities. If my body was not a weight to me, I should not be able to walk. If the atmosphere did not press down on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, insubstantial.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

An "unemployed" existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. Because to live means to have something definite to do – a mission to fulfil – and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

When one speaks of “select minorities” it is usual for the evil-minded to twist the sense of this expression, pretending to be unaware that the select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself than the rest, even though he may not fulfill in his person those higher exigencies. For there is no doubt that the most radical that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands of themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be for every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

 

[FrogPad]

Like all of Erdos's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdos accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdos said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.

"One thing kids like, is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. 'Oh no,' I said, 'Disneyland burned down.' "He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. 'I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late."
-Jack Handey

Believe you can, believe you can't; either way, you're right.
-Henry Fords