Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
-Samuel Johnson
Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
-Charlotte Bronte
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.
-M. King Hubbert
If you don't laugh at yourself, you have missed the biggest joke of all!
-Charles Richard Snyder
In more recent years, people have really started to appreciate the importance of the systems approach and systems analysis.
We are now talking about a whole new mindset and worldview based on this understanding of systems and the interconnectedness
between components and processes. With systems we can look at connections between elements, at new properties that emerge
from these connections and feedbacks, and at the relationships between the whole and the part. This worldview is referred
to as "systems thinking".
-Alexey Voinov
Leverage, leverage. If he could know this, maybe he'd have leverage.
-Terl, character created by author L. Ron Hubbard in the book Battlefield Earth
The key point to remember is that all dynamic behavior is produced by a combination
of reinforcing and balancing loops.
- Virginia Anderson and Lauren Johnson
The true worth of a man is to be measured by the objects he pursues.
-Marcus Aurelius
If you think you know what I'm doing wrong well you're gonna have to get in line...
-Ani DiFranco
When you get there, there isn't any there there.
-Gertrude Stein
The way you think creates the results you get. The most powerful way to improve the quality of your results is to improve
the way you think.
-Stephen G. Haines
If nothing else works, this may be a perfect opportunity to use common sense.
-William Hoest
For every complex problem, there is a simplistic answer and it is always wrong.
-H.L. Menkin
BLOFELD
Kronsteen, you're sure this plan is foolproof?
KRONSTEEN
(tapping a cigarette against its case)
Yes, it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation
of counter-move.
[Later]
BLOFELD
What do you have to say, Number Five?
KRONSTEEN
He was Kleb's choice. Her people failed.
KLEB
(to Kronsteen)
It was your plan! They followed it implicitly.
KRONSTEEN
Impossible. It was perfect.
KLEB
Except for one thing. They were dealing with Bond!
-Movie, From Russia With Love, Novel by Ian Fleming
Discipline is remembering what you want.
-David Campbell
Most research is a synthesis of problem solving and creativity.
-Joan Borysenko
Unpredictability is closely related to uncontrollability.
-Joan Borysenko
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
-Edward Gibbon
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
-Henry Bergson
The belief in a certain idea gives to the researcher the support for his work. Without this belief he would be lost in
a sea of doubts and insufficiently verified proofs.
-Konrad Zuse
Looking back on my life, I can nevertheless only hope that in the future there will be a place not only for the specialist
in his field, but also for the talented generalist. I believe that it is precisely this well-roundedness that is the prerequisite for
ideas outside the norm. In the final analysis, the computer was such an idea - if you will, a side-step of technology.
-Konrad Zuse
I have a friend I go to whenever I have a really tough problem to solve. After I explain it to him, invariably his first
question is, "What rules can we break?" He knows that I have assimilated so many rules into my thinking that after a while
they become blind assumptions. It's difficult to be innovative if you're following blind assumptions.
-Roger von Oech
Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have
always been done.
-Rudolph Flesch
A man without a plan is not a man.
-Neitsche
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience
that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
-Oscar Wilde
I don't see how you can write anything of value in social science if you don't offend someone.
-Marvin Harris
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
-E. M. Forester
A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
-Benjamin Franklin
Work smarter, not harder.
-Alan Lakein
It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes that he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward
to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not by the possession, but the search after the truth
that he enlarges his power, wherein alone consists his ever-increasing perfection.
-Gotthold Lessing
Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart
tells you... Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself,
and yourself alone, one question... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use.
-Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan
The builder of the best racing car is not necessarily its best driver.
-Hans Selye
Neither the prestige of your subject and
The power of your instruments
Nor the extent of your learnedness and
The precision of your planning
Can substitute for
The originality of your approach and
The keenness of your observation.
-Hans Selye
The first key trait to develop which I like to call the fundamental prerequisite
of nature is the skill of keen observation. The best problem-solvers around the world are also the best observers.
-Rajesh Kumar
you will need the devil's creativity to solve the seemingly unsolvable. Always be intrigued. Always be prepared for surprises.
-Rajesh Kumar
If you want to solve your problems, you'll need to do your own thinking.
-Rajesh Kumar
if you find yourself trying to adapt past solutions to new situations, stop yourself at once. The adapted solution may
only be incrementally better, a mere iteration over the previous solution. You want to instead think through a problem from
scratch, re-consider every single variable again, and re-hash all the things that could go wrong. This might seem time-consuming
but the importance of certain variables are always changing so frequently. What was just a minor detail last year now becomes
critical.
In essence, if you can skip iterating and simply jump to the best solution at once, you'll be leaps and bounds
better off than the rest of crowd that are relying solely on their memories and their experiences to solve their complex
problems.
-Rajesh Kumar
The great successful men (and women) of the world have used their imagination... They think ahead and create their mental
picture, and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering
this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building - steadily building.
-Robert Collier
once you become aware of what means the most to you, you're less likely to put off something that's really valuable for
something that matters much less... it's knowing the difference between what's important and what isn't that allows us to
solve problems effectively.
-Joy Browne
Q: How do you define stress?
A: As the nonspecific response of the body to any demand. That includes both agreeable and disagreeable demands.
-Hans Selye
From Shakespeare's As You Like It, 1600:
JAQUES:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women
merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his
time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling
and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
'Vague' is vague... In what follows I shall use 'vague' in two senses. First, 'vague' in the sense of being indefinite,
i.e., lacking definite boundaries as e.g. between a mountain and a valley, between day and night, etc. I shall also use 'vague'
in the sense of being indeterminate, as applies to mountains vis-a-vis hills... The sense of 'vague' I shall not
use is that of being obscure."
-Avishai Margalit, Vagueness in Vogue, 1976 [glad he cleared that up...]
How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.
-Sophocles, Oedipus The King
What we observe is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-Werner Heisenberg
The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.
-W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
emergent properties are observable at the systems level alone, and will not, and
cannot, be found by following the reductionist strategies of research in accordance with the normal positivistic ways of performing
science. The 'secrets' of emergent properties are to be revealed by holistic research strategies only.
-Felix Muller and Sven Erik Jorgensen
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
-Pema Chodron
