Cris > Cris's Quotes

“Lo sai che penso? Che è facile stare insieme quando va tutto bene. Il difficile è quando si devono superare le montagne, fa freddo e tira vento. Allora, forse, per trovare calore, uno si deve fare un poco più vicino. Te lo dice uno che campa nel freddo. E che non ha nessuno per trovare calore.”
― Maurizio de Giovanni, La condanna del sangue: La primavera del commissario Ricciardi

“It is said that one often meets one’s fate on the path one has taken to avoid it.”
― Niklas Natt och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman

“It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how we can enjoy a sonata or a sunset. Empathy, for Vischer, was creative seeing, reshaping the world so as to find ourselves reflected in it. In”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numberss are only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed become fetishes.”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“The word 'risk' derives from the early Italian risicare, which means 'to dare'. In this sense, risk is a choice rather than a fate. The actions we dare to take, which depend on how free we are to make choices, are what the story of risk is all about. And that story helps define what it means to be a human being.”
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers bring about a suspension of common sense”
― Darrell Huff

“a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Math, like meditation, puts you in direct contact with the universe, which is bigger than you, was here before you, and will be here after you.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman of the University of Sydney were studying the way slime molds handled tough choices. A tough choice for a slime mold looks something like this: On one side of the petri dish is three grams of oats. On the other side is five grams of oats, but with an ultraviolet light trained on it. You put a slime mold in the center of the dish. What does it do? Under those conditions, they found, the slime mold chooses each option about half the time; the extra food just about balances out the unpleasantness of the UV light. If you were a classical economist of the kind Daniel Ellsberg worked with at RAND, you’d say that the smaller pile of oats in the dark and the bigger pile under the light have the same amount of utility for the slime mold, which is therefore ambivalent between them. Replace the five grams with ten grams, though, and the balance is broken; the slime mold goes for the new double-size pile every time, light or no light. Experiments like this teach us about the slime mold’s priorities and how it makes decisions when those priorities conflict. And they make the slime mold look like a pretty reasonable character. But then something strange happened. The experimenters tried putting the slime mold in a petri dish with three options: the three grams of oats in the dark (3-dark), the five grams of oats in the light (5-light), and a single gram of oats in the dark (1-dark). You might predict that the slime mold would almost never go for 1-dark; the 3-dark pile has more oats in it and is just as dark, so it’s clearly superior. And indeed, the slime mold just about never picks 1-dark. You might also guess that, since the slime mold found 3-dark and 5-light equally attractive before, it would continue to do so in the new context. In the economist’s terms, the presence of the new option shouldn’t change the fact that 3-dark and 5-light have equal utility. But no: when 1-dark is available, the slime mold actually changes its preferences, choosing 3-dark more than three times as often as it does 5-light!”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Mathematics is common sense.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“His most famous paradox goes like this. I decide to walk to the ice cream store. Now certainly I can’t get to the ice cream store until I’ve gone halfway there. And once I’ve gone halfway, I can’t get to the store until I’ve gone half the distance that remains. Having done so, I still have to cover half the remaining distance. And so on, and so on. I may get closer and closer to the ice cream store—but no matter how many steps of this process I undergo, I never actually reach the ice cream store. I am always some tiny but nonzero distance away from my two scoops with jimmies. Thus, Zeno concludes, to walk to the ice cream store is impossible.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It appears to me that many cultured people are attacked by the same disease. Criticism of ourselves and everything else is corroding our active power; we have no stable basis, no point of issue, no faith in life.”
― Henryk Sienkiewicz, Without Dogma

“Liber e cel ce nici măcar nu știe că e liber,nici că există libertate,nici că există închisoare.Liber e nu cel ce se află dincolo de bin și de rău,ci în afara obsesiilor libertății și pușcăriei.A dori să nu ai dorințe înseamnă tot a avea o dorință.aceea anume de a nu avea dorințe.Liber,nici măcar liber,nici măcare ne-liber,liber cel ce trăiește oricum,cel ce nici nu acceptă nici nu refuză să trăiască,cel care pentru a trăi și a muri e totuna.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The governess was not much liked in the village. She was too tall, too fond of books, too grave, and, a curious thing, never smiled unless there was something to smile at.”
― Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“An idea so luminous flashed across her brain that she almost thought the room had leaped into light.”
― E.F. Benson

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.”
― Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“But this "progress" in psychiatry had gone hand in hand with what, to many, seemed to be the pathologising of perfectly ordinary human weirdness.”
― Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England

“Forgiving, that's what she is, and lonely. A person can forgive a lot if they need the company.”
― Ali Land, Good Me, Bad Me

“Growing up, I said, is a solitary process of disentanglement from those who made us and the reality of it cannot be avoided but only, perhaps, deferred”
― Jessie Greengrass, Sight

“Change what you do, not how you think. You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“future happiness cannot compensate for current misery; lost happiness is lost forever. Powered”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life