“Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” — Wernher von Braun
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” — Niels Bohr
“An expert is one who knows so much about so little that he neither can be contradicted, nor is worth contradicting.” — Henry Ward
“You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won’t; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don’t know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn’t be?” — Stephen Leacock, How to Make a Million Dollars, 1910
There was a young man of Cadiz,
Who inferred that life is what it is,
For he early had learnt,
If it were what it weren’t,
It could not be that which it is.
— J. St. Loe Strachey (editor of The Spectator)
“The origin of science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.” — William Hazlitt
More maxims of La Rochefoucauld:
And “We take less Pains to be happy, as to appear so.”
“It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.” — Leonardo
“I cannot afford to waste my time making money.” — Louis Agassiz
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” — Charles Bukowski
“A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.” — Max Gluckman
Maxims of François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680):
And “Hope, deceitful as it is, carries us thro’ Life agreeably enough.”
“It is only through fiction that facts can be made instructive or even intelligible.” — George Bernard Shaw
“People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.” — Anthony Powell
“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” — Philip Roth
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad.” — Miles Kington
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.” — Will and Ariel Durant