Philosophical
"
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in
knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.
"
Socrates
"
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to
seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will
believe it.
"
Bertrand Russell
"
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well,
one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
"
Vincent Van Gogh
"
The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.
"
Jonas Salk
"
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
"
Albert Szent-Gyorgoi Von Nagyrapolt
"
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
"
George Box
Inspirational
"One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved.
One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts
"
Albert Einstein
"
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
"
Mohandas Gandhi
"We choose to
go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize
and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are
willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to
win..."
John F. Kennedy
Address at Rice University in the Space Effort
September 12, 1962
"Sometimes I look out at the moon on a beautiful cold winter night
in New Mexico, and frankly, I have a hard time believing I was ever there."
Frank Borman
1994
Commander, Apollo 8
"Dream big, and dare to fail."
Norman D. Vaughan
1995 at age 89 after climbing the 10,302-foot mountain bearing his name in Antarctica's
Queen Maud range, 280 miles from the South Pole. He had a fused ankle and artificial
knee at the time of the climb. He was a member of Adm. Richard E. Byrd's 1928-1930
Antarctic expedition.
"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been
only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me."
Isaac Newton
(Quoted in Richard S. Westfall,
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton [1980],
p. 863.)
..."all progress, all success, springs from thinking."
"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would
literally astound ourselves!"
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt
discarded is another step forward."
"I pity the man without a purpose in life."
"Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration."
Thomas A. Edison
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who
points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again,
because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best,
knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at
least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
"The one thing I want to leave my children is an
honorable name. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to
succeed."
Theodore Roosevelt
Chicago, IL
April 10, 1899
"Do not give up what you want most for what you want at the moment."
Scott P. Smith
(Paraphrasing something I heard on the radio.)
Atlanta, GA
February 2004
Software and Engineering
"Lots of engineers mistake hard for valuable."
Max Levchin, Co-Founder of PayPal
Funny (at least to me)
"A witty saying proves nothing."
Voltaire
"Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody."
Mark Twain
Quotes I DO NOT LIKE
"Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people."
Eleanor Roosevelt
I get the point of this quote,
but it is so poorly constructed that it borders on
nonsense. From the first line, it follows that I
can: endorse capital punishment for jaywalking,
endorse racism, claim the earth is flat, claim the
lunar landing was faked, and claim space aliens built
the pyramids – and it means I have a great mind.
The last line is talking about gossip (obviously),
but it carelessly uses the term “discuss people”.
So according to this quote, if I tell my mother how
her grandkids are doing in school, I have a small
mind? I don’t think so.
Here are some quotes about gossip I like:
"Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility."
Josiah Gilbert Holland
"The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them."
Will Rogers
"No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues."
Bertrand Russell
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