Weil’s Law of University Hiring: “First-rate people hire other first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people. Third-rate people hire fifth-rate people.” (from French mathematician André Weil)
“Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.” — Montesquieu
“Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.” — Montesquieu
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” — Leonardo
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” — Nietzsche
“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.” — Voltaire
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — Tolstoy
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” — Montaigne
“Opinions are made to be changed, or how is truth to be got at?” — Lord Byron
“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.” — G.C. Lichtenberg
(Thanks, Larry.)
“The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.” — Albert Einstein
“Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.” — W.H. Auden
“It is well to read everything of something and something of everything.” — Henry Brougham
“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” — Inscribed on Thomas Huxley’s memorial
“The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.” — Horace Walpole
“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” — Francis Bacon
“Good can imagine Evil, but Evil cannot imagine Good.” — W.H. Auden
“Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don’t you agree?” — Boethius
“For never, never, wicked man was wise.” — Homer
“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.” — G.K. Chesterton
American artist Dennis Oppenheim denied that his 1997 Device to Root Out Evil, above, had an anti-religious message. “Pointing a steeple into the ground directs it to hell as opposed to heaven,” he told one interviewer. “It’s a very simple gesture.”
“It has been said of the Iliad that anyone who starts reading it as history will find that it is full of fiction but, equally, anyone who starts reading it as fiction will find that it is full of history.” — Arnold Toynbee
“Sweet is the remembrance of troubles when you are in safety.” — Euripides
“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” — James Thurber
But:
“In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.” — Boethius
