Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“...Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
― Albert Einstein

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”
― George Harrison

“I am thankful to all those who said no. It's because of them, I did it myself.”
― Wayne W. Dyer, You'll see it when you believe it

“Damn it all, you have been given a life on this beautiful planet! Get off your ass and do something!”
― Nick Offerman, Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

“My favorite rule from Sensei was “Always maintain the attitude of a student.” When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up every day wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honor for being so smart. As human beings, we, by the definition of our very natures, can never be perfect. This means that as long as we are alive and kicking, we can be improving ourselves.”
― Nick Offerman, Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Principles for Delicious Living

“Always maintain the attitude of a student. When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up everyday wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honour for being so smart.”
― Nick Offerman

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“When you have a lot of shine to you, as so many bighearted people often do, you can attract a lot of people easily, because people are drawn to it, that kind of light. It can be so easy to forget that not everyone deserves your shine. But when you spend so much of your earliest years being told you have no shine at all, even though you're pretty sure maybe you do, and someone finally tells you they see it too, you do, you have it, you want to give them everything. Because of this, more often than not, you're not falling in love with them, you're using them as a way to fall in love with yourself.”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't