Senthil Kumaran > Senthil's Quotes

“It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy... Let's go exploring!”
― Bill Watterson, It's a Magical World

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...”
― Isaac Asimov

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“That’s right, but it’s not a mathematical proposition. It’s a sociological observation
and there is always the possibility of exceptions to such observations." - Dr. Mandamus to Dr. Kelden Amadiro”
― Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire

“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied, 'and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Being helpless is one of the things that isn’t altogether amusing." - Gilbert”
― Isaac Asimov, The Stars, Like Dust

“The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer. It is just a tool to help you see ideas more clearly.”
― Carlos Bueno, Lauren Ipsum

“Mostly lost is fun, but completely lost is serious.”
― Carlos Bueno, Lauren Ipsum

“There’s no need to use a big, complex idea when a small simple one will do.”
― Carlos Bueno, Lauren Ipsum

“The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy. It took a long time to learn the right questions to ask.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“This - not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture - is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“No one is satisfied with his fortune,and everyone is satisfied with his wit.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.”
― Epictetus

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
― Charles Darwin

“trallalala”
― Dav Pilkey, Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot vs. the Jurassic Jackrabbits from Jupiter

“two wrongs dont make a right”
― Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets

“Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be
more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.'

R. Giskard Reventlov”
― Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire

“Understanding what chimpanzees are like has made me realize that we humans are not so different from other animals as we used to think. What makes us most different is that we are far more clever than even the cleverest chimp, and we have words. We have a spoken language. We can tell stories about what happened a week or a year or a decade ago. We can plan for the future, and we can discuss things - one person's idea can grow and change as other people contribute their ideas. Great ideas become greater, problems are solved.”
― Jane Goodall, My Life with the Chimpanzees

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.

What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Sakyamuni means "the silent one or the sage (muni) of the Sakya clan". Though he is the founder of a widely taught world religion, the ultimate core of his doctrine remains concealed, necessarily, in silence.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations.
When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.”
― Confucius

“If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries—particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries—is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. The”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

“To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.”
― Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality