Quotes

In order to be creative one must first gain control of the medium.

- Gerry Sussman

A desire not to butt into other people’s business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.

- Robert Heinlein

Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

- Frank Herbert

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

- John Steinbeck

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

- Anton Ego

It is possible to write endlessly on elliptic curves. (This is not a threat.)

- Serge Lang

Truly, if I could not be Alexander, I would want to be Diogenes.

- Alexander the Great

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

- Mark Twain

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

- Seneca

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

- T.H. White

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

- John Steinbeck