Sparks-y Quotes!

Jonah Lehrer, on causality

2012-03-08T17:23:00.001+05:30

"A cause is not a fact. It’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts"

John Jeremiah Sullivan, on Jesus Christ

2012-03-08T17:18:00.001+05:30

"His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness"

Henry Ford, on innovation

2012-03-08T17:13:00.001+05:30

"Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas"

Malcolm Gladwell, on theory

2012-03-08T17:07:00.001+05:30

"People are information-rich and theory-poor. If you can give them a way of organizing their experience, then their minds are wide open"

Leon Wieseltier, on browsing

2012-03-08T17:06:00.001+05:30

"When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for"

Kenan Malik, on belief

2012-03-08T17:04:00.000+05:30

"No one comes to believe in God because they have been convinced by the arguments for God’s existence"

Helmuth von Moltke, the Elder, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff

2011-09-16T21:25:00.003+05:30

"No plan survives the first two minutes of battle."

Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon movie

2009-12-02T02:03:00.000+05:30

Fear... is the price of our instrument(imagination).

Claude Lévi-Strauss, French Anthropologist

2009-11-06T17:40:00.001+05:30

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Donald Knuth

2009-11-05T16:58:00.001+05:30

The journey is more important than the destination—that’s part of life.

If you only live for getting to the end, you’re almost always disappointed.

Alfred North Whitehead

2009-11-04T20:06:00.001+05:30

God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Donald Knuth, Coders at Work book

2009-11-04T18:51:00.000+05:30

I think it’s probably more that I’ll try harder things. I always try

things that are at my limit. If I had to go back and write those kinds of

programs again, the easier ones, I wouldn’t make so many mistakes. But

now that I know some more, I’m trying to write harder stuff. So I make

mistakes because I’m always operating at my limit. If I only stay in

comfortable territory all the time, that’s not so much fun.

James Cameron, film director

2009-10-19T23:06:00.001+05:30

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success."

John Keats

2009-08-21T05:45:00.003+05:30

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

There's nothing stable in the world;uproar's your only music.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

Quoted by Stroustrup in The C++ PL 3rd Edition

2009-05-07T17:04:00.001+05:30

‘‘... and you, Marcus, you have given me many things; now I shall give you this good

advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You

have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave

and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would

affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that

Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All

over the world people are doing stupid things ... I should like you to be easy, your little

heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as

many as you can think of ...’’

– Karen Blixen

(‘‘The Dreamers’’ from ‘‘Seven Gothic Tales’’)

Steve Wozniak, Apple, as quoted in Founders at Work

2009-04-04T00:38:00.003+05:30

My whole life was basically trying to optimize things.

You don’t just save parts, but every time you save parts

you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time

it takes to understand something. And how good you can build

it without errors and bugs and flaws.

... design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was

competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s

because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up

with ideas that nobody else would come up with.

All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.

I had no tools; my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. I know what’s

going on better if I’m not going through a tool.

He would ask questions like, “What’s the market?” And I’d say, “A million.” And he’d say,

“How do you know?” And I said, “Well, there’s a million ham radio operators,

and computers are more popular than ham radio.” Nobody in the world could

ever deny that. But it’s not the sort of analysis that they wanted. And there were

no analysts yet that were predicting that this was going to be a big marketplace

anyway.

If there was any engineering to do, hardware or software, I did it, because Steve could do stuff, but he couldn’t do it as well as I. So never once did he even try.

Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?

Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail.

You have to be so careful that you haven’t left something out. You have to think

harder and deeper than you normally would. It’s hard with today’s large, huge

programs.

Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to

your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities.

2008-12-16T03:34:00.000+05:30

"Free will.. it's a bitch"

--Al Pacino, The Devil's Advocate movie.

2008-12-08T11:10:00.000+05:30

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

-- Barrack Obama

It's easy to make a buck;it's a lot tougher to make a difference

-- Tom Brokaw, CNBC Talkshow host.

John Keats

2008-12-03T02:53:00.002+05:30

"at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced; even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

2008-11-29T05:15:00.004+05:30

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

2008-11-22T19:23:00.003+05:30

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

--Learnado da Vinci.

Buncha'em!

2008-11-16T00:40:00.002+05:30

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. " --Goethe

"Experience is the only source of knowledge" - A Einstein

"Doing fundamental analysis can lead to non-standard choices." - On choosing Lisp.

The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong.

-Georges Bidault

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

-Georges Bernanos

ou must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures. ~Charles C. Noble

Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution. ~Anthony J. D'Angel

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. ~Thomas Alva Edison

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief. ~William Shakespeare, Othello

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. ~Oscar Wilde

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

EMIL'E CHARTIER

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Benjamin Franklin

All movements go too far.

Bertrand Russell

If I love you, what business is it of yours? ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. ~Leo Tolstoy

The love game is never called off on account of darkness. ~Tom Masson

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.”

Swedish Proverb quotes

If I have made myself clear, you must have misunderstood me.

- Alan Greenspan

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it

- Richard Feynman

Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.

- Richard Friedman

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

- Lawrence Durrell

"You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do." -- Liz Smith

"If you really want to do something, you will find a way. If you don't, you will find an excuse." --Anonymous

"It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust."

-- Samuel Johnson

The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh. --Andre Gide

A blind admiration would have been precarious; a deserved admiration would have been a responsibility; an undeserved admiration was precious.

- Ayn Rand, 1936

2008-11-16T00:40:00.001+05:30

"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." -- Talmud

Reality

2008-11-15T19:28:00.000+05:30

Being a visionary is trivial. Being a CEO is hard. All you have to do to be a visionary is to give the old 'MIPS to the moon' speech. That's different from being a CEO of a company and seeing where the profits are.

--Bill Gates, Wall Street Journal July 29,1993, p. 131

Work?

2006-09-17T04:48:00.000+05:30

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.
--Thomas A. Edison