Quotations

“If you admit your faults, then other people can't point them out at you.”

“I am not who you think I am. I am not who I think I am. I am who I think you think I am.”

“We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires.”

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it.”

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.”

“I've been thinking. Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day that I've been in the service. Twenty-eight years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than ten months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy; but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!”

“Wheat stocks heaviest with grain bow the lowest.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Empathy is not the truth — it's not the reality — it's the other side's point of view.”

“Whenever you are observing an entity from the outside and they are apparently engaged in crazy or irrational behavior, it's rarely because the entity is actually irrational. It's usually because you are lacking some information about the internal mechanisms of what’s going on.”

“... when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all.”

“Those on the fringes are often the harbingers of what is to come.”

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it... An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.”

“If people are saying bad things about you, you don't have to defend it. Because your friends will know it's not true, and the people that don't like you, they're not going to believe it when you do defend yourself anyway, so just don't engage.”

“As long as some minds remain a mystery, so too will all minds.”

“If there's one person around you who makes you feel defensive, you lose the confidence to play and it's good-bye creativity. So always make sure your play friends are people you like and trust. And never say anything to squash them either. Never say 'no' they're wrong or 'I don't like that'. Always be positive and build on what's been said.”

“Be an improviser and change the world: make a connection, listen, say 'yes, and...', be in the moment, stay flexible, avoid preconceived ideas, respect other people's choices, listen to your inner voice, and follow your intuition.”

“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

“It's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong.”

“The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound health when you enter.”

“When we don't know how the things are working, we call it magic... once we know how it is working, it becomes a technique.”

“I do not refuse my dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion.”

“I guess when someone's wrong, they never they never know how.”

“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”

“In math, you should always be happy to play with examples that are idealized, potentially well beyond the point of being realistic, because they can offer a good first step in the direction of something more general, and hence, more realistic.”

“Confirmation bias is when your brain ignores evidence that doesn't support your beliefs, and then it cherry picks the evidence that does... If you assume good intentions on the part of your friends and family, and you tell yourself you're lucky to have them... Studies have shown that the best predictor of divorce is if the couple assumes bad intentions in their partner's actions... if you get it in your head that your partner is selfish or inconsiderate or willfully refusing to take out the garbage, that creates a negative feedback loop of confirmation bias, seeking to find further evidence that your spouse is a jerk, even when good faith efforts are being made.”

“He told me to close my eyes and find a plane based on how it feels. He asked me to make a slight right turn while keeping my eyes closed. I did so, and after the turn I thought I was flying level, but I had inadvertently tipped the plane into a graveyard spiral... How you feel is not necessarily how it is. In fact, going by feel without having an idea of where you are in the scheme of things will often get you into very big trouble in life as well as in aviation.”

“...a very fundamental part of my soul is to doubt and to ask... I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here... I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

“No, not Northward; upward; out of Flatland altogether.”

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“... there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it.”

“...that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes thought of by romantics as all of science itself because that’s the only part with much visual surface. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be.”

“In addition to the uncertainties that we must deal with in astronomy as a consequence of the limited accuracy of our equipment, and also to limits in available observation time, there are the astronomers' nightmares: the 'unknown-hidden' uncertainties. Is there perhaps an error you are making that you don't even know about because you're missing something, or because your instruments are calibrated incorrectly?... We call that a systematic error, and it scares the hell out of us.”

“There is a hole at the bottom of math. A hole that means we will never know everything with certainty. There will always be true statements that cannot be proven.”

“We must know. We will know.”

“Naive you are if you believe life favours those who aren't naive.”

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

“The apparent collapse of the wavefunction is indeed a profound mystery — should we then be surprised that one response is to build invisible universes to compensate?... These makeshift repairs and inventions are needed if science is not to be derailed or demoralized by its lacunae... These might turn out to be entirely the wrong concepts, but they make our ignorance concrete and enable us to think about how to explore it.”

“The best story always wins.”

“The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!”

“I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn't end up in computer science.”

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician.”

“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.”

“Not a word out of place, not a word too many, not a word too few. Just enough.”

“There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with art - lessness.”

“If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research.”

“The company that tries to make a product that everybody will like usually ends up making a product that nobody likes.”

“Whenever I say something stupid, it's because I thought of the smart thing first.”

“Even if there's a little bit of fire, it's not a big deal. This is exactly what we try to do. We learn from everything...”

“Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness... They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.”

“At this point, I'm looking at this and thinking 'is this even going to end up being a thing that I love? Am I doing this right? Am I doing something centrally wrong? And that just makes this par for the course for any build.'”

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”

“Theory often makes it sound as if the various moves being discussed are either 100 percent effective or not at all. Reality is almost always somewhere in between. So do the best you can with your strategic thinking, but don't be surprised if something unexpected an 'unknown unknown,' as a former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would say nullifies your efforts.”

“He that lets the small things bind him leaves the great undone behind him.”

“Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better”

“...there is no difference between inspiration and lack of distraction. They are the same thing.”

“I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second... I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.”

“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

“Surprisingly, sometimes giving up on doing things in the perfect order may be the key to getting them done.”

“You get more prestige by doing good science than by doing popular science”

“Brady Haran: "Did you think it would be finished by now?" Donald Knuth: "Yes, I thought it would be finished by the time my son was born." Brady Haran: "How old is your son now?" Donald Knuth: "55"”

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

“Deadlines are good... If you're going to have a massive engineering program, you have to have a schedule, because schedule helps you mitigate different things. Like, for example, as an engineer, I can keep working on something forever until it's absolutely perfect, but at some point in time, you have to get it good enough, and unless you have a schedule to motivate you to shed all of your uncertainties, you're never going to think it's good enough.”

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”

“As I've told you before, in a job like yours, even when it's finished, there's always one more thing to do.”

“As eternity is reckoned there's a lifetime in a second.”

“In this moment, there is just this. Anything else is just an idea.”

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

“All the time we are aware of millions of things around us... aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think.”

“If you're on the right path, it doesn't matter if you don't reach your destination because you were already living it.”

“All emotions are fleeting.”

“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.”

“We tend to believe that massive outcomes must have massive causes...”

“The Gods only condemned Sisyphus to push the boulder… they didn’t condemn him to resent the process.”

“Can you hear that? That is the majestic hush of a paradigm shift.”

“Experience is what you get right after you need it.”

“Eye of newt and wing of flea, what is next year's GDP?”

“Your bad habits can kill you. But your good habits won't save you.”

“I believe that you don't truly own anything until you have voided its warranty.”

“Calculus is the mathematics of change.”

“The luxury of having money isn't being able to indulge in luxuries, it's being able to not worry about money.”

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer — born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.”