Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog > Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog's Quotes

“We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called "real life" in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fictions of facts with the facts of fiction.
... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan

“Looking for you was like looking for the day before yesterday”
― Shalome Aleichem

“A foot note in Scale, Geoffery West:

The full quotation from Einstein is worth repeating because it emphasizes a central dictum of science:
"Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed this into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics, indeed of modern science altogether."

Taken from Einstein's "On the Methods of Theoretical Physics," Essays on modern Science (New York:Dover, 2009) 12-21”
― Einstein Albert 1879-1955

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Some nice quotes:
"that in all my illegitimate inroads against the legal letter of the law the article sold must be existent, visible, producible. In that way and by a careful study of city ordinances and train schedules I have kept out of all trouble with the police that a five dollar bill and a cigar could not square.”
― O Henry 1862-1910

“It is given to us to calculate, to weigh, to measure, to observe, this is natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.”
― Voltaire

“Malice lies dormant in all of us and anyone who knows how to exploit it, how to turn it sharply in one direction can hope for an echo.”
― Golo Mann

“If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]”
― Niels Bohr

“If you can fathom quantum mechanics without getting dizzy, you don't get it
Et kvantebitte spring nærmere supercomputeren”
― Niels Bohr

“A CLASSIC WAITS for me, it contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if taste were lacking, or if the endorsement of the right man were lacking.
O clublife, and the pleasures of membership,
O volumes for sheer fascination unrivalled.
Into an armchair endlessly rocking,
Walter J. Black my president,
I, freely invited, cordially welcomed to membership,
My arm around John Kieran, Pearl S. Buck,
My taste in books guarded by the spirits of William Lyon Phelps, Hendrik Willem Van Loon,
(From your memories, sad brothers, from the fitful risings and callings I heard),
I to the classics devoted, brother of rough mechanics, beauty-parlor technicians, spot welders, radio-program directors
(It is not necessary to have a higher education to appreciate these books),
I, connoisseur of good reading, friend of connoisseurs of good reading everywhere,
I, not obligated to take any specific number of books, free to reject any volume, perfectly free to reject Montaigne, Erasmus, Milton,
I, in perfect health except for a slight cold, pressed for time, having only a few more years to live,
Now celebrate this opportunity.
Come, I will make the club indissoluble,
I will read the most splendid books the sun ever shone upon,
I will start divine magnetic groups,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of distinguished committees.
I strike up for an Old Book.
Long the best-read figure in America, my dues paid, sitter in armchairs everywhere, wanderer in populous cities, weeping with Hecuba and with the late William Lyon Phelps,
Free to cancel my membership whenever I wish,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensible,
Never tiring of clublife,
Always ready to read another masterpiece provided it has the approval of my president, Walter J. Black,
Me imperturbe, standing at ease among writers,
Rais'd by a perfect mother and now belonging to a perfect book club,
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, astigmatic,
Loving the masters and the masters only
(I am mad for them to be in contact with me),
My arm around Pearl S. Buck, only American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature,
I celebrate this opportunity.
And I will not read a book nor the least part of a book but has the approval of the Committee,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which they hinted at,
All is useless without readability.
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms (89¢ for the Regular Edition or $1.39 for the DeLuxe Edition, plus a few cents postage).
I will make inseparable readers with their arms around each other's necks,
By the love of classics,
By the manly love of classics.”
― Elwyn Brooks White

“Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

[Shrub Flubs His Dub, The Nation, June 18, 2001]”
― Molly Ivins

“An aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom , but to set a limit on infinite error.
Life of Galileo Quoted in The Perfectionists”
― Bertold Breht

“It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.
Nicomachean Ethics”
― Aristotle

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Television is democracy at its ugliest.”
― Paddy Chayefsky

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”
― Marcel Proust

“He who is capable of really reading a writer will have his every question answered by the works themselves. For example, Kafka depicts the dreams & visions of his lonely, difficult life and it is these dreams & visions alone that should preoccupy us & not the interpretations that sharp-witted critics can give these writings. Their interpreting is an intellectual sport, one that is good for clever people who can read & write books on African sculpture or 12-tone music but who never get to the heart of works of art because they stand at the gate fumbling with their 100 keys, blind to the fact that the gate is not really locked.”
― Hermann Hesse

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A friend said to me, “Hey you need to grow a pair. Grow a pair, Bro.” It’s when someone calls you weak, but they associate it with a lack of testicles. Which is weird, because testicles are the most sensitive things in the world. If you suddenly just grew a pair, you’d be a lot more vulnerable. If you want to be tough, you should lose a pair. If you want to be real tough, you should grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Sheng Wang

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
-- Omar Khayyam
...

Nor will I: ever write a word that fades in light, this I must be certain; else lay desolate at bight. <3”
― Omar Khayyam, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

“..for we all are dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending..”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“„What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as child? Variant: What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”
― Lin Yutang