Tom Semple

“But so soon as I had achieved the entire course of study at the close of which one is usually received into the ranks of the learned, I entirely changed my opinion. For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance. —Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, 1637”
― Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science

“I can hear the Colonel—no land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth—but it does not make me feel any better.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves