“An Algonkin word which an unliterary translator might render correctly as dawn, actually means ‘hither-whiteness-comes-walking.'” — Mary Austin, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXXII, Sec. 12
“The most useful measure of information content is the number of distinct yes-no questions the information can answer.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“General summaries often emphasize that science is about finding regularities in the workings of the universe, explaining how the regularities both illuminate and reflect underlying laws of nature, and testing the purported laws by making predictions that can be verified or refuted through further experiment and observation. Reasonable though the description may be, it glosses over the fact that the actual process of science is a much messier business, one in which asking the right questions is often as important as finding and testing the proposed answers. And the questions aren’t floating in some preexisting realm in which the role of science is to pick them off, one by one. Instead, today’s questions are very often shaped by yesterday’s insights. Breakthroughs generally answer some questions but then give rise to a host of others that previously could not even be imagined.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“Just surrender and it won’t hurt at all.” — Brian May, “Hammer to Fall”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCGtN1lKoUc
“He who never has a garden, and knows naught of flowers, and never looks back into the earthly paradise,—he is but a slave and serf of the plough, and is accursed.” — Francis Daniel Pastorius (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXXI, Sec. 2)
“The peasant and the pedant, though one talks like a man and the other like a book, are alike in that each speaks his language in only one way; the educated man knows and employs his language in three or four ways. He has only an enlightened sense of appropriateness to guide him.” — Harry Morgan Ayres, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXX. Sec. 10
“Excellence is largely a matter of details.” — Harry Morgan Ayres, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXX. Sec. 3
“Variety is of the essence of language. Uniformity and consistency are inventions of philosophical grammarians whose efforts are most successful when they deal with a language no longer used to satisfy elementary social needs. A living language is one of the mores of a social group; it is neither a biological growth unaffected by human intervention nor a work of art given its form for all time by a single act of human creation. Consequently it will vary within the group somewhat according to the variation in other respects to be found in the individuals comprising it, and between groups it will vary still more. Like other mores it will be subject to modification by time. But the necessity for mutual intelligibility within the group will greatly restrict the play of individual whim; between groups this force will operate somehow in proportion to the immediacy of their contacts. In a cultured city like ancient Rome or mediæval Florence a group of people might raise and maintain a literary standard around which literary people of other groups would rally. Or, again, a convenient dialect might be somewhat arbitrarily chosen for a particular literary task, as Luther chose the dialect of the Saxon chancellary for his translation of the Bible, and this dialect, with more or less conscious modification from time to time, might remain the standard literary language. In all these cases the great mass of people, not wholly uninfluenced by the literary language perhaps, would go on speaking their own dialects.” — Harry Morgan Ayres, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXX. Sec. 2
“Conviction is a good motive, but a bad judge.” — Albert Einstein, 1917 (quoted in The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene)
“The ages do not exhaust, nor custom limit, the variety of ways for satisfying popular taste.” — Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXVI, Sec. 1
“The world resists me and I resist the world.” — John Gardner, “The Song of Grendel”
“In the grand scheme of things, everything we know points toward human beings not occupying a privileged position.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“The art of physics lies in deciding what to ignore.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“If the laws you have prove mutually incompatible, then—clearly—the laws you have are not the right laws.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“What’s gratifying about being human, what’s exciting about being part of the scientific enterprise, is our ability to use analytical thought to bridge vast distances, journeying to outer and inner space… it is the depth of our understanding, acquired from our lonely vantage point in the inky black stillness of a cold and forbidding cosmos, that reverberates across the expanse of reality and marks our arrival.” — Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
“A man cannot be a master artist if he lies to himself, settles for illusions.” — John Gardner, “The Temptation of St. Ivo”
“The scheme of providence demands of us all that each man humbly perform his part, sing his own line in the terrestrial hymn, as the planets are singing, unheard, above us, and with charity forgive those to left and right when they falter. That may sound pompous, simpleminded, but it’s true, or anyway I hope it’s true. A man can go mad, discarding all tradition, reasoning out for himself the precise details of celestial and terrestrial law.” — John Gardner, “The Temptation of St. Ivo”
“Pneumococci are great levelers of vanity and ambition.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“The best way to do good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXIV, Sec. 3)
“A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.” — James Madison (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXIII, Sec. 18)
“The knowledge of what tends neither directly nor indirectly to make better men and better citizens is but a knowledge of trifles. It is not learning but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness.” — The Rev. Dr. William Smith (Provost, University of Pennsylvania, 1755-1779), quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXIII, Sec. 15
“Learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of governments. God keep us from both.” — Sir William Berkeley (Governor of Virginia, 1641-1677), quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXIII, Sec. 3
“To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it? How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws? What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?” — Amy Tan, “The Joy Luck Club”
“The man who serves is the one who comes to understand other men.” — Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXII, Sec. 9
“Gradually public opinion concerning the scope and purpose of government in its relation to the general welfare underwent a transformation. The view which had long been dominant was that national prosperity depended upon the prosperity of the manufacturing and commercial classes of the country; when they flourished the labourer would enjoy a ‘full dinner pail,’ the shopkeeper a good trade, the farmers high markets, and the professional classes would collect their fees; consequently it was only right that such important matters as the tariff and monetary standards should be determined according to the ideals of the great business interests of the country. The new view was that the object of legislation should be to aid all citizens with no special privilege or regard to any one class. Its birth was in the Granger movement. It was more widely disseminated by Populism, but its ablest presentation was by William Jennings Bryan, notably in his speech before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1896: ‘You have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. A man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as a merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who, by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country, creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding place the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade, are as much business men as the few financial magnates, who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak for this broader class of business men.’” — The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXI, Sec. 36
“It’s in words that the magic is—Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.” — John Barth, “Dunyazadiad”
“You cannot conjure madness out of a cabbage. You cannot craze a block of wood with an axe. You cannot blow the brains from a squash. You cannot sell such a fine fierce commodity as madness and pass it over a grocer’s counter.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“Calmness, forbearance, candor, and soft speech—these virtues of the good are by the insolent taken for the effects of incompetency. The person who is self-laudatory, wicked, badly bold, and who publishes his own praise and metes out chastisement everywhere, is honored in the world. By moderation one cannot attain celebrity; by moderation one cannot obtain fame.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddhakanda Sarga 21
“Even a wicked-minded enemy, if he with folded palms and a poor heart craves for your shelter, should not be slain. If an enemy, proud or terrified, seeks shelter in fear, he should be saved by a great man even at the risk of his own life. One who from fear, ignorance, or willfulness does not protect him who seeks his shelter perpetrates a mighty iniquity and is blamed by all. When a person is slain before him whose shelter he has taken, he takes away all the virtues of his protector. So great is the sin in not affording shelter unto those who seek it; it stands in the way of going to heaven, bringing in calumny and destroying strength and prowess.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddhakanda Sarga 18