Yonatan Bebchuk > Yonatan's Quotes

“Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein

“That Schmidt, he didn’t have enough imagination for mathematics. Now he has become a poet. For that he had just enough.”
― David Hilbert

“A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.”
― David Hilbert

“The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.”
― Kurt Gödel

“Today we have once again out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians: we kept silent”
― Karl Menger

“It is a fault to punish a fault in full (culpa est totam persequi culpam)”
― Seneca, De la Clemencia

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here. (lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate)”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“A leader is a dealer in hope.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Adequacy is sufficient: everything else is irrelevant.”
― Adam Osborne

“The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.”
― Xenophanes

“All that is true of their art of midwifery is true also of mine, but mine differs from theirs in being practised upon men, not women, and in tending their souls in labor, not their bodies. But the greatest thing about my art is this, [150c] that it can test in every way whether the mind of the young man is bringing forth a mere image, an imposture, or a real and genuine offspring. For I have this in common with the midwives: I am sterile in point of wisdom, and the reproach which has often been brought against me, that I question others but make no reply myself about anything, because I have no wisdom in me, is a true reproach; and the reason of it is this: the god compels me to act as midwife, but has never allowed me to bring forth. I am, then, not at all a wise person myself, [150d] nor have I any wise invention, the offspring born of my own soul; but those who associate with me, although at first some of them seem very ignorant, yet, as our acquaintance advances, all of them to whom the god is gracious make wonderful progress, not only in their own opinion, but in that of others as well. And it is clear that they do this, not because they have ever learned anything from me, but because they have found in themselves many fair things and have brought them forth.”
― Plato, Theaetetus

“נמשיך בשלום כאילו אין טרור, ונילחם בטרור כאילו אין שלום”
― יצחק רבין

“This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
― Voltaire

“You have the watches, but we have the time”
― Taliban

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“It is, indeed, an innovator's dilemma.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Hindi edition) | इनोवेटर्स डिलेमा: जब नई तकनीकें महान कंपनियों को विफल कर देती हैं - हिंदी में