Inspiring Quotes

“The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
Peter H. Diamandis | Burt Rutan

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
George Bernard Shaw

“One who wants to do something will find a way. One who doesn’t will find an excuse.”
Confucius

“If I only play the odds, I will never achieve anything against the odds.”
Unknown

“Never give up, and good luck will find you.”
Unknown

“No pressure, no diamond.”
Unknown

“The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviours requires research as fundamental in its nature as any other. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.”
P. W. Anderson
(in “More is Different”, Science vol. 177 no. 4047, pp. 393-396, 1972)

“There is no limit to what a man can achieve as long as he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”
Accredited to Harry S Truman (also to Bob Woodruff)

“If we understand the problem, we can manage it. If we don’t understand it, we can only fight it.”
A. Elliott (talking about wildfires)

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Albert Einstein

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
George Box

“Linear systems are important because we can solve them.”
Richard Feynman

“The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory.”
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

“When theory and practice clash, theory loses every single time.”
Linus Torvalds

“The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.”
Thomas Huxley

“Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense.”
Thomas Huxley

“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.
If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.”
Carl Sagan

“Science is a way of organizing reproducible knowledge about problems; of focusing and disciplining imagination; of weighing evidence; of deciding what is relevant and what is not; of impartially testing hypotheses; of ruthlessly discarding data that prove to be inaccurate or inadequate; of finding, interpreting, and facing facts; and of making the facts of nature the servants of man.
This scientific method requires of its practitioners high standards of personal honesty, open-mindedness,  focused vision, and love of the truth.”
Warren Weaver
(in Science and Complexity, 1948)

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Accredited to Derek Bok

“A lot of time is often spent optimising something that shouldn’t exist.”
Elon Musk

“Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.”
John Ruskin

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Charles Bukowski

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Leo Tolstoi

“War does not determine who is right. Only who is left.”
Bertrand Russell

“War is a place where the young kill one another without knowing or hating each other because of the decision of old people who know and hate each other without killing each other.”
Erich Hartmann

“No one who has chosen the easy path of hate has gotten to the end of the road and said ‘What a life!‘”
Arnold Schwarzenegger

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
Winston Churchill

“The problem in our times is that people do not want to be useful but important.”
Winston Churchill

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
Winston Churchill

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who haven’t got it.”
George Bernard Shaw

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Edward Abbey

“The idea is not to confront bad ideas but to come up with good ideas. Otherwise, your enemies define the game and you are the loyal opposition.”
Terence McKenna

“Perfection is great, but it’s not enough.”
Benjamin Zander
Interpretation: It is great to do something well, but there must also be a reason for doing it.

“Honesty is an expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people.”
Accredited to Warren Buffet

“A sheep spends its whole life fearing wolves but eventually gets eaten by the shepherd.”
Accredited to Robert Mugabe

“If you don’t want anyone to know, don’t do it.”
Chinese proverb

“The short-term pain of accepting the truth is much better than the long-term pain of believing an illusion.”
Unknown

“That who does not know what they are seeking is unable to understand what they find.”
Unknown

“Nothing is exactly as it seems. Nor is it otherwise.”
Unknown

“You make your choices, and you live with them. And in the end, you are those choices.”
Unknown

“You are the master of your silence, but a slave to your words.”
Unknown

“May the flowers that bloom remind us why the rain was necessary.”
Unknown

“It doesn’t matter how many problems you have. It matters they are not the same as last year.”
Unknown

“It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.”
Unknown

“An apology is just a truce. It doesn’t fix anything.”
Unknown

“Considering what I think,
what I want to say, what I mean to say, what I actually say,
what you want to hear, what you actually hear,
what you think you understand, what you want to understand,
and what you actually understand,
there are nine possibilities of misunderstanding.”
Unknown