Words of Wisdom

“Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.”

“There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.”

“To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.”

“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  

“If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future.”

“There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged; everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”

“Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions.”

“Unthinking respect for authority,” said the legendary theoretical physicist, “is the greatest enemy of truth.”

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”

“If you are receptive and humble,” said Dirac, “mathematics will lead you by the hand.”

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”

“I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.'”

“Games are a trigger for adults to again become primitive, primal, as a way of thinking and remembering. An adult is a child who has more ethics and morals; that’s all.”

“The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.”

“A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door — he’s the person who opens a door funny.” 

“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.”  

“Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn, and laughter…”

“People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.”

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” 

“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”

“I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare.’ I say I ‘walked down the road.’ I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning.’ I say I ‘passed a school.’ You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice.”

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”  

“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”

The noted Mexican painter wrote in her diary of the solidarity she feels with others like her who feel like “the strangest person in the world.”

“There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.”

“I also strongly believe that science is no longer a vocation where an individual sits in a darkened lab with his instruments, tinkering away at some big question.  Science is collaborative, and will become more so.”