Chen Xin > Chen's Quotes

“A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 2

“We ought not to flatter ourselves with any idea of "absolute" or "final" rigor in contemporary mathematics. In a science that is not yet dead and mummified, there is not and cannot be anything perfect.”
― A.D. Aleksandrov, Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning

“It was harder to work out that there was a question than to think of the answer.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you," and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. ”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.”
― Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

“The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.”
― Kenneth Clark

“One does not need a faith in God. Sufficient is a faith in created things, that enables one to move among objects in the conviction that they exist, persuaded of the irrefutable reality of this chair, this umbrella, this cigarette, this friendship. He who doubts himself is lost, just as someone scared of failure in love-making fails indeed. We are happy in the company of people who make us feel the unquestionable presence of the world, just as the body of the beloved gives us the certainty of those shoulders, that bosom, that curve of the hips, the surge of these as incontestable as the sea. And one who is in despair, we are taught by Singer, can act as though he believed: faith will come afterwards.”
― Claudio Magris

“If a man without a woman, as it says in a passage in the Talmud dear to the heart of Kafka, is not a man, then it is Amshel who became a man, even though on the point of death, but it is Franz who narrates this odyssey and teaches us how to become Amshel, how to become a man.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Suleika knows that she is only a passing moment, the crest of a wave or the hem of a cloud, but she is soberly content to be, do an instant, the embodiment of that flow.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The past has a future, something it becomes, and that transforms it. Like the facts themselves, the person, the "I", who experiences it and looks back on it discovers that it is not singular, but plural. Traveling through those places marked down in those epic chronicles of thirty years ago, one gets the impression of slicing through paper-thin, invisible barriers, different levels of reality, still present and with us even though not discernible to the naked eye, infrared or ultraviolet rays of history, images and instants that at this point cannot print an image on the celluloid, but which nonetheless are, and exist in the same way for tangible experience as electrons which elude our grasp.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Herein lies the attractiveness of ethnic agitation: its ease and accessibility. The Other is visible, everyone can recognize and remember his image. One doesn’t have to read books, think, discuss: it is enough just to look.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

“As a child, be well-behaved.
As a youth, be self-controlled.
As an adult, be just.
As an elder, be wise.
As one dying, be without pain.”
― Peter Frankopan

“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement— all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual... The greatest scientific deed of her life—proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them—owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed.”
― Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Anyone who claims that democracy is a necessity for economic growth and health improvements will risk getting contradicted by reality. It’s better to argue for democracy as a goal in itself instead of as a superior means to other goals we like.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Data was absolutely key. And because it will be key in the future too, when there is another outbreak somewhere, it is crucial to protect its credibility and the credibility of those who produce it. Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intentions.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“These risks need to be approached with cool heads and robust, independent data. These risks require global collaboration and global resourcing. These risks should approached through baby steps and constant evaluation, not through drastic actions These risks should be respected by all activists, in all causes. These risks are too big for us to cry wolf.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. I have been wrong about the world so many times. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps me see my mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand, someone with different ideas.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and nondramatic representative picture of the world, as statistics agencies do. It would be correct but just too boring. We should not expect the media to move very far in that direction. Instead it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully, and to realize that the news is not very useful for understanding the world.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think