Favorite Quotes
Philosophical
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.
Socrates
The greatest hindrance to learning is the illusion of knowledge.
Unknown
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will
believe it.
Bertrand Russell
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.
Jonas Salk
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgoi Von Nagyrapolt
Inspirational
One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts
Albert Einstein
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Gandhi
We choose to
go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…
John F. Kennedy
Address at Rice University in the Space Effort
September 12, 1962
Sometimes I look out at the moon on a beautiful cold winter night in New Mexico, and frankly, I have a hard time believing I was ever there.
Frank Borman
1994
Commander, Apollo 8
“Dream big, and dare to fail.
Norman D. Vaughan
1995 at age 89 after climbing the 10,302-foot mountain bearing his name in Antarctica’s Queen Maud range, 280 miles from the South Pole. He had a fused ankle and artificial knee at the time of the climb. He was a member of Adm. Richard E. Byrd’s 1928-1930 Antarctic expedition.
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
(Quoted in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton [1980], p. 863.)
…all progress, all success, springs from thinking.
If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves!
I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
I pity the man without a purpose in life.
Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison
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 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to
succeed.
Theodore Roosevelt
Chicago, IL
April 10, 1899
Do not give up what you want most for what you want at the moment.
Scott P. Smith
(Paraphrasing something I heard on the radio.)
Atlanta, GA
February 2004
Software and Engineering
Lots of engineers mistake hard for valuable.
Max Levchin, Co-Founder of PayPal
Funny (at least to me)
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Mark Twain
The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.
Will Rogers
No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell