They say your intelligence blunts with age, but
the reverse has happened to me. I think more
imaginatively because I have such an enormous
amount to draw on, fifty years of thinking
and living.

I am like my garden, my brain has been mulched
and manured, things have grown and I am more
complicated.~Jonathan Miller, The Times [November 13, 2001]

The entire history of physics since Galileo bears witness to the importance of the function of the theoretical physicist, from whom the basic theoretical ideas originate. A priori construction in physics is as essential as empirical facts.
~ Albert Einstein

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.
~ Freeman Dyson

The unified field theory has been put into retirement. It is so difficult to employ mathematically that I have not been able to verify it somehow, in spite of all my efforts. This state of affairs will no doubt last many more years, mostly because physicists have little understanding for logical-philosophical arguments.
~ Einstein

***

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
~ Michael Crichton, State of Fear

If there's anything a public servant hates to do it's something for the public.

-- Kin Hubbard: (1868-1930) US journalist, humorist

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

-- Mark Twain: (1835-1910) US novelist, journalist, river pilot

If misery loves company, then triumph demands an audience.

-- Brian Moore: (1921-1999) Irish novelist

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.~Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

All are luatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.~Ambrose Bierce

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics* to a barmaid.
~ Albert Einstein (*P3 (prerequisite for understanding P2 & P1)

See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.
~ Three wise Monkeys

A myth is, of course, is not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to reallocate them.
~ Gilbert Ryle

***

I have learned from experience that, in the bluff and counterbluff of world politics, to draw a hostile war lord as a horrible monster is to play his game. What he doesn't like is being shown as a silly ass.
~ Sir David Low

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find-at the age of 50, say-that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.~Agatha Christie

Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries.

-- Henry Wotton: (1568-1639) English poet, diplomat

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

-- Paul Cezanne: (1839-1906) French painter

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.
~ Sir Issac Newton (P1-3)

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.
~ Sir Issac Newton

[On Newton] His great and lucid ideas will retain their unique significance for all time as the foundation of our whole modern conceptual structure in the sphere of natural philosophy.
~ Albert Einstein

***

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
~ Paul Valery

We need books that affect us like a disaster. That grieve us deeply. Like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves. Like being banished into the forests far from everyone. Like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.~Franz Kafka

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

***

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom.

-- Benjamin Britten: (1913-1976) English composer.

It ain't a bad plan to keep still occasionally, even when you know what you're talking about.

-- Kin Hubbard: (1868-1930) US journalist, humorist


In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

-- Desiderius Erasmus: (1469?-1536) Dutch scholar, philosopher, author

A moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole,
It does not look likely to stir a man's soul.
'Tis the deeds that were done 'neath the moth-eaten rag,
When the pole was a staff, and the rag was a flag.
~ Sir Edward Bruce Hamley

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

***

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

-- Will Rogers: (1879-1935) US actor, lecturer, humorist.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.~Billie Holiday (1915-1959), Lady Sings The Blues [1956], Chapter 11

When a heroine goes mad, she always goes into white satin.~Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), The Critic, III.i (1779)

What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball~Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, bk.1, ch.5.

A little girl can be sweeter (and badder) oftener than anyone else in the world. She can jitter around, and stomp, and make funny noises that frazzle your nerves.
~ Alan Beck, "What Is a Girl?" pamphlet distributed by New England Life Insurance Co Boston, 1956.

Women ought to be quiet. When people are talking, they ought to retire to the kitchen.~W.H. [Wystan Hugh] Auden (1907-1973), Table Talk [1947]

It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him.~Robertson Davies