Continuous Improvement > Continuous's Quotes

“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy in Creation, this is a source of joy, as it is to those who rejoice in freedom...
To those would-be solvers of "the human problem," who hope for knowledge equal to (capable of controlling) the world, it is a source of unremitting defeat and bewilderment. The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve "the human problem." Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests - with Genesis - that knowledge is the problem. Or perhaps we should say instead that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge: Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn? And, having learned, how and for what should we use what we know? (pg. 183, People, Land, and Community)”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”
― Albert Einstein

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude" ("He who has begun is half done: dare to know!").”
― Horace

“You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.... The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.”
― Richard Feynman

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.”
― Muhammad Ali

“Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood.”
― Lu Xun

“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.”
― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Invert. Always invert.”
― Carl Jacobi

“The cost of dependability is the utmost simplicity; most computer organisations find this cost too high to pay.”
― Charles Antony Richard Hoare

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan

“Life calls, not for perfection, but for completeness.”
― Carl Jung

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”
― John Gall, The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
― Anatole France, Works of Anatole France

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau