-Mortimer Adler

 

The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
-Mortimer Adler

 

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
-Michel Foucault

 

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-Laurens Van Der Post

 

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
-Jose Ortega Y Gasset

 

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
-Jose Ortega Y Gasset

 

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.
-Plato

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
-Plato

 

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
-Eric Hoffer

 

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
-Eric Hoffer

 

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
-Eric Hoffer

 

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
-Eric Hoffer

 

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence
-David Hume

 

We asked ourselves the question: What would e-mail look like if it was invented today? [JLJ - this question could be asked of any concept or process]
-Lars Rasmussen

 

I do believe that you can achieve more if you're willing to take risks. There's almost a total correlation between the amount of risk you're willing to take and then the amount of stuff you then potentially can get done.
-Lars Rasmussen

 

Did you notice how quickly it reloads?

-Jens Rasmussen, after the software application he was demonstrating crashed in the middle of his presentation.

 

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.
-Baltasar Gracian

 

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-Bertrand Russell

 

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

-Bertrand Russell

 

Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
-Erich Fromm

 

The question of how strong chess computers might be in correspondence chess may be important to both the development of computers and to the understanding of human chess skill.
-Robert I. Reynolds

 

Chess is 90 percent tactics, but the [other] 10 percent is more important.

-Ken Plesset

 

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

 

A great discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery. Such expert experiences at a susceptible age may create a taste for mental work and leave their imprint on mind and character for a lifetime.

-George Polya, 1944.

 

Four phases trying to find the solution, we may repeatedly change our point of view, our way of looking at the problem. We have to shift our position again and again. Our conception of the problem is likely to be rather incomplete when we start the work; our outlook look is different when we have made some progress; it is again different when we have almost obtained the solution. In order to group conveniently the questions and suggestions of our list, we shall distinguish four phases of the work. First we have to understand the problem; we have to see clearly what is required. Second, we have to see how the various items are connected, how the unknown-known is linked to the data in order to obtain the idea of the solution, to make a plan. Third, we carry out our plan. Fourth, we look back at the completed solution, we review and discuss it.

-George Polya, 1944.

 

Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more important than the inventions themselves.

-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716)

 

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
-Alfred North Whitehead

 

Philosophy is the product of wonder.
-Alfred North Whitehead