Nothing like an assortment of miscellaneous quotes, right? I don’t entirelly agree with them, nor with everything else the people who said them have said, but these quotes have made me think or feel at some point. I’ll add more once in a while.
Quotation (Alan Watts)
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Quotation (Steve Brunton)
The success of a community depends on the education of its members.
Quotation (Galen Seilis)
The world is not mathematical, but rather mathematics is worldly.
Quotation (Michael Stevens)
I am death and I am the scattering.
Quotation (Alan Watts)
As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”
Quotation (Richard Rohr)
We don’t think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Quotation (Aaron Seilis)
A good life is filled with many different things.
Quotation (Alan Watts)
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Quotation (Albert Einstein)
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
Quotation (John Tukey)
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
Quotation (Karl Pearson)
The mathematics are not there for the joy of the analyst but because they are essential to the solution.
Quotation (Bertrand Russell)
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Quotation (Bertrand Russell) One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Quotation (Bob Ross)
I don’t try to understand everything in nature. I just look at it and enjoy it.
Quotation (Bob Ross)
Friends are the most valuable things in the world, and even a little tree needs a friend.
Quotation (Bob Ross)
Happy accidents can be your best friend.
Quotation (Bob Ross)
You’ll never believe what you can do till you get in there and try it.
Quotation (Bob Ross)
Things that just happen are sometimes more beautiful than things you really sit and plan.
Quotation (Carl Sagan)
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
Quotation (Carl Sagan)
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Quotation (Carl Sagan)
We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Quotation (Eric Weinstein)
Mathematics makes you pay for every attempt to intuitively encode something that isn’t precise.
Quotation (Baltasar Gracián)
Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement.
Quotation (George Bernard Shaw)
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Quotation (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.
Quotation (Steven Pinker)
If dissenters are punished, and can anticipate they’re going to be punished, then you might have a situation where no one actually believes something, but everyone believes that everyone else believes it. Therefore, no one is willing to be the little boy that says the emperor is naked.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
The shame-bound individual is like a fox that’s been trained to hunt itself to exhaustion while the hounds sit back and enjoy the show. What’s more, the fox often continues to hunt itself long after the hounds are gone.
Quotation (Thomas Paine)
When men yield up the privilige of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
Quotation (Aristotle)
The arousing of prejedice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal […] It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity - one might as well warp a carpenter’s rule before using it.
Quotation (Cory Doctorow)
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
A knowing smile doesn’t actually require knowledge, just a mouth.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
Pseudoscience often strikes educated, rational people as too nonsensical and preposterous to be dangerous… this is not a wise attitude.
Quotation (Michael Specter)
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; however, everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
Displays of unshakeable conviction don’t require the possession of truth.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
If we are to achieve maturity as individuals and as a species we need to recognize and address the systems that infantilize us.
Quotation (Sheldon Kopp)
A grown-up can be no one’s disciple.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
To the starving individual a crumb is a feast. To an abused individual a scrap of attention can feel like a tidal wave of love.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
We can’t fix broken people. But we can hold those who endeavour to fix themselves.
Quotation (Unknown)
Distrust those who demand you forgo your critical thinking, limit your relationships, abandon your logical faculties, waive your moral reasoning, or surrender your humanity.
Quotation (Christopher Hitchens)
Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
People who don’t want you to think are never your friend.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
No one can absolve us for our trespasses against other people. Forgiveness comes, or it doesn’t come, from the injured party.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
Better never to have known a narcissist than to have known and rejected one.
Quotation (Theramin Trees)
We’ll always find people suggesting we’re flawed. But in certain areas of like therapy, religion, and the workplace, those suggestions can carry undeserved authority. When we’re given observable evidence of harmful behaviour, then we have something to explore, but not when we’re faced with mere stigma and assumptions. There’s no reason to entertain imaginary defects.
Quotation (Paul Halmos)
The source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly great generality is in essence the same as a small and concrete special case.
Quotation (Paul Halmos)
For Dieudonne the important result is, I think, the powerful general theorem, from which it is easy to infer all the special cases you want; for me the greatest kind of step forward is the illuminating central example from which it is easy to get insight into all the surrounding sweeping generalities.
Quotation (George Box)
All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
Quotation (George Box & Norman Draper)
Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
Quotation (John Tukey)
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
Quotation (Stephen John Senn)
I’ve been studying statistics for over 40 years & I still don’t understand it. The ease with which non-statisticians master it is staggering.
Quotation (Qingyuan Weixin)
Before I had studied Chan for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.
Quotation (Anonymous)
This feeling is real, but it may not be true.
Quotation (Voltaire, maybe)
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Quotation (Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear)
It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.
Quotation (Rutherford D. Roger)
We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.
Quotation (Anonymous)
People seem remarkably unaware that Logic allows the use of parentheses in the construction of expressions.
Quotation (Anonymous)
Just because you can talk to computers doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say to them.
Quotation (Hank Green)
Mostly this comes to a problem I have with reality, which is that there’s just too much of it. And thus it is very hard to be aware of all of it, and so we end up with things that are incomplete making their way into our brains.
Quotation (John Green)
No matter what you do the tides of time will wash away your sand castle, so there’s no sense in reaching for some foolhardy notion of immortality when there is real work to be done with real people right now.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
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.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which ‘are’ there.
Quotation (Richard Feynman)
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Quotation (CGP Grey)
The math says ‘no’.
Quotation (Elon Musk)
I want you to think ahead and think so hard every day that your head hurts. I want your head to hurt every night when you go to bed.
Quotation (George Orwell)
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Quotation (Grant Sanderson)
Math shines a light on unexpected connections.
Quotation (Grant Sanderson)
Sometimes the best narrative is rooted in a really good application, but much more counter-intuitive, and just as true, is that some of the most useful math that you can find, or that you can teach, has its origins in someone who is just looking for a good story.
Quotation (James Clear)
The ultimate form of instrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of our identity.
Quotation (James Clear)
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Quotation (James Clerk Maxwell, 1850)
The actual science of logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible, or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on. Therefore the true logic for this world is the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind.
Quotation (Jim Rohn)
We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and disappointment.
Quotation (John Green)
Hazel is wrong about infinite cardinality, but she’s right that some infinities are larger than others. I wanted her to be wrong but right because that’s how we muddle through as observers of the universe, forging meaning where we can find it, from fact and fiction alike.
Quotation (John Tukey)
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
Quotation (John Tukey)
The simple graph has brought more information to the data analyst’s mind than any other device.
Quotation (Michael Shermer)
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Quotation (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.
Quotation (Simon Pampena)
Randomness is clumpy.
Quotation (Richard Branson)
Respect is how to treat everyone, not just those you want to impress. Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
Quotation (Shunryu Suzuki)
If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.
Quotation (Stephen Hawking)
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Quotation (Tears for Fears, Everybody Wants To Rule The World)
Help me make the most of freedom.
Quotation (Tool, Schism)
I’ve done the math enough to know the dangers of our second guessing
Quotation (Tim Maudlin)
The ability to predict is not the ability to understand.
Quotation (Anonymous)
Everyone wants acurracy, precision, or rigor until it costs something. It always costs something.
Quotation (Anonymous)
The truth is very complicated, and no one wants that.
Quotation (Anonymous)
It is often easier to solve hypothetical problems than actual problems. We humans often take the easy path when we don’t know what the problem is.