Quotables

“A Man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert A. Heinlein, in Time Enough for Love

“No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the service of the monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.”
- José Antonio Abreu, in Kids Transformed by Music

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”.
- Roosevelt

“Ambition is a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the present.”
- Emanuel Derman, in My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

“To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live entirely without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything on this earth is subject to sin. Sin is like gravity.”
- Myriel, in Les Miserables

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
- John F Kennedy

“I’ve always believed in numbers, in the equations and logic that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life. It’s only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found. I’m only here tonight because of you. You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons.’”
- John Nash’s Nobel acceptance speech, in A Beautiful Mind (2001)

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
- Albert Einstein

“All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.”
- Pink Floyd, in Breathe

“Darling, you can’t live your life trying to avoid the mistakes I’ve made, you’ve got to make your own.”
- Sara, to her daughter, in Laws of Attraction

“Youth is not a time of life-it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.”
- Samuel Ullman

“…if the worst came to the worst, you didn’t need to have any form at all. You didn’t need to put what you had to say into a poem, an essay, a story, or a novel. All you had to do was say it.”
- William Saroyan

“There comes a time when the heaping-up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter – when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”
- Jean-Dominique Bauby, in The Diving-Bell and The Butterfly

“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.”
- Jerry, in Mark Twain’s Cone-pone Opinions

“Were it not for the fact that we’re blind this mix-up would never have happened, You’re right, our problem is that we’re blind. The doctor’s wife said to her husband, The whole world is right here.”
- José Saramago, in Blindness

“‘I’d rather be myself,’ he said. ‘Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.’”
- Bernard, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

“Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – a limited being.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes from Underground