John B. > John's Quotes

“...Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.”
― Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

“If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation.”
― Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There's someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero Zero: An Acclaimed Political Thriller Unraveling Mussolini's Conspiracy, Media Hoaxes, and Italian History

“alcoholic. To Quinn, for whom alcohol was a touchy simile, the truth was this: playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted. He”
― Monica Wood, The One-in-a-Million Boy

“And many students can't go a week without a savory cheese tart they call a 'pizza'....”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“Mathematicians aren’t people who find math easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“Because we all make mistakes. Relentlessly. And that is nothing to be feared”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors