August quote

I should post this every year...

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week."

-Willa Cather (from The Professor's House, 1925) 

Feynman quotes

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” ― Richard P. Feynman

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

― Richard P. Feynman

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

― Richard Feynman

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”

― Richard P. Feynman

City quote

“How’s anyone ever going to come up with a book or a painting or a symphony or a sculpture that can compete with a great city? You can’t. When you look around, every street, every boulevard is its own special art form.”

 - Gil in Midnight in Paris

Stories

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. 

 - Robert McKee 

“If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life.” 

- Siberian Elder

Work!

"Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!"

- Isaac Asimov 

1964 NY Times 

Green fire

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

 - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

Quote about thinking

“No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.”

― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Rachel Carson birthday quotes

Today is Rachel Carson's 107th birthday. We can celebrate with quotes...

The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.

or

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. ― in Silent Spring

or

This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.

or full passages from her writing.

Happy birthday reading.

Genius quote

“Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary person sees one.”

 – Erza Pound