Jack > Jack's Quotes

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
― George E.P. Box

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible.”
― Albert Camus

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“We Fremen have a saying: ‘God created Arrakis to train the faithful.’ One cannot go against the word of God.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
― George Orwell

“Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like to have such issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms: this is all good and that is all bad.”
― Theodore John Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.”
― Tim Urban

“I'll tell you a secret.
Something they don't teach you in your temple.
The Gods envy us.
They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
― David Benioff

“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 21.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Steve Jobs

“If you don't sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice”
― Anonymous

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
― Nikola Tesla

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”
― Plato, Apology

“Problems are inevitable. But problems are also soluble”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”
― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elective Affinities

“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.”
― Frederich Schiller

“Make time for civilization, for civilization won't make time.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
― Max Planck

“It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge. Enrico Fermi”
― Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations