The Impossible Takes Longer (8 page)
Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
418. All kids are scientists. They're born scientists. They ask all these terrible questions that nobody can answer because they're scientists. So, what do you do? You beat that curiosity out of them and they stop asking questions. It's very hard to survive that.
Leon Lederman
PHYSICS, 1988
419. Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993
420. Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child.
Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993
421. The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
422. You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984
423. Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
André Gide
LITERATURE, 1947
424. Family solidarity is after all the only good thing.
Marie Curie
PHYSICS, 1903; CHEMISTRY, 1911
425. When the ways of friends converge, the whole world looks like home for an hour.
Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946
426.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
LITERATURE, 1923
427. When the whole world's against you, the thousandth man will stand your friend.
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
428. I said earlier that love is tragic; I add here that friendship is a response to tragedy.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
429. If you sacrifice a friend in a difficult hour, you never make another friend again.
Shimon Peres
PEACE, 1994
430. Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you.
Yasser Arafat
PEACE, 1994
431. Today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
432. Solitude is the grandest prize that anybody could receive.
Camilo José Cela
LITERATURE, 1989
433. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
434. My whole life presents a unity. Everything I have done, even my writing, grows out of a fascinated interest in human beings, in the wonders of their minds and hearts, their sensitivities, their needs, and the essential loneliness of their position in the universe.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
435. We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
Maurice Maeterlinck
LITERATURE, 1911
436. Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
437. Nearly all the great creators were almost recluses. Either one has many ideas and few friends, or many friends and few ideas.
Santiago Ramony Cajal
MEDICINE, 1906
438. In the West there is loneliness, which I call the leprosy of the West. In many ways it is worse than our poor in Calcutta.
Mother Teresa
PEACE, 1979
439. Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for great enough to die for.
Dag Hammarskjöld
PEACE, 1961
The work that leads to the Nobel Prize is conducted primarily in the minds of men and women, minds focused and disciplined, well trained and well educated. Analysis of mind, however, as opposed to its exercise, is the domain of philosophers, and there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy. Nonetheless, many laureates have made astute observations on the subjects of the human mind and human learning.
Educational institutions play a major role in the lives of laureates. Among the universities, England's Cambridge University is the undisputed leader. It claims over sixty laureates, and if it were a country, it would stand sixth
in
the number of Nobel Prize winners it has produced. Harvard comes next with over forty laureates. City College of New York is singled out for praise on account of its free tuition, which enabled nine future laureates to attend. However, some universities also have Nobel skeletons in their closets. Cambridge University dismissed Bertrand Russell from his fellowship in 1918 for his pacifism, and in the same year, Emily Balch was fired by Wellesley College for the same reason. Brooklyn Polytechnic obliged Gertrude Elion to abandon her doctoral studies because she could not afford to give up her part-time
job, and she became one of only a handful of science laureates never to earn a doctorate.
Schools can be difficult places for precocious youngsters, and a number of Nobel laureates have been highly critical of educational practice. Others have taken steps to remedy the deficiencies of schools. Marie Curie, Bertrand Russell, and Rabindranath Tagore all founded schools. Several science laureates have been dedicated and popular university teachers. The physicist Carl Wieman and the chemist Harold Kroto committed their Nobel Prize money to projects to improve the teaching and understanding of science. Three weeks before his death, Richard Feynman, although seriously ill, accepted an invitation to participate in a panel on education at his local high school.
440. Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
441. Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
442. No, no. You are not thinking, you are only being logical.
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
443. I don't mind if you think slowly, doctor, but I do mind if you publish faster than you think.
Wolfgang Pauli
PHYSICS, 1945
444. One must think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Henri Bergson
LITERATURE, 1927
445. Many people would rather die than think. In fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
446. If we fail to teach our children the skills they need to think clearly, they will march behind whatever guru wears the shiniest cloak.
Paul Boyer
CHEMISTRY, 1997
447. Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
448. Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
449. I've seen more common sense expressed around the table in a farm house than I have around the table in the United Nations committee room.
Lester Pearson
PEACE, 1957
450. Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
451. There's zero change in human intelligence in a million years and it won't change in the next million.
Carleton Gajdusek
MEDICINE, 1976
452. It is an exceptional, almost pathological constitution one has if one follows thoughts logically through, regardless of consequences. Such people make martyrs, apostles, or scientists, and mostly end up on the stake or in a chair, electric or academic.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
MEDICINE, 1937
453. I emphasize the extinction between the ideas of the necessity and of the sufficiency of reason as a defense against that mad and self-destructive form of anti-rationalism which seems to declare that because reason is not sufficient, it is not necessary.
Peter Medawar
MEDICINE, i960
454. I know as well as anyone that the intellectual is a dangerous animal ever ready to betray.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
455 When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect—but do not believe him. Never put your trust in anything but your own intellect.
Linus Pauling
CHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962
456. I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
457. We all are born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
458. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
459. If I had any nerves, I'd have a nervous breakdown.
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
460. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
461. Nobody would be so demented as to imagine for a moment that when you go to a shrink you get anything resembling good mental health.
Kary Mullis
CHEMISTRY, 1993
462. You
never
understand everything. When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.
Philip Anderson
PHYSICS, 1977
463. On one occasion a man came to ask me to recommend some of my books, as he was interested in philosophy. I did so, but he returned next day saying that he had been reading one of them, and had found only one statement he could understand, and that one seemed to him false. I asked him what it was, and he said it was the statement that Julius Caesar is dead. When I asked him why he did not agree, he drew himself up and said: "Because I am Julius Caesar."
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
464. Without passion there is no genius.
Theodor Mommsen
LITERATURE, 1902
465. The popular mind imagines the scientist as a lonely genius. In reality, few of us are geniuses, and even fewer are lonely.
J. Michael Bishop
MEDICINE, 1989
466. Talent fulfilled brings the deepest content that an individual can know.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
467. How quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals!
Saul Bellow
LITERATURE, 1976
468. Everyone thinks that having a talent is a matter of luck; no one thinks that luck could be a matter of talent.
Jacinto Benavente
LITERATURE, 1922
469. The larger the circle of light becomes, the greater the perimeter of darkness around it.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
470. I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
471. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
472. If no one has been annoyed for some time by what he sees to be your irresponsibility, you should consider whether you are holding your imagination too much in check.
EdmundPhelps
ECONOMICS, 2006
473. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
SaulBellow
LITERATURE, 1976
474. An individual, a society without memory, is a sick individual, a sick society.
HeinrichBoll
LITERATURE, 1972
475. I personally have never believed in the therapeutic effect of "letting grass grow over the past."
Willy Brandt
PEACE, 1971
476. I seek in my writing to hold back time so that the present is not forgotten.
Giinter Grass
LITERATURE, 1999
477. Forgetting is a virtue, memory, a vice.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
LITERATURE, 1956
478. In old age we no longer live our lives, we merely keep on our feet with the aid of memories.
KnutHamsun
LITERATURE, 1920
479. When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we did not love enough.
Maurice Maeterlinck
LITERATURE, 1911
480. The best we can expect from people is to be forgotten.
FrancoisMauriac
LITERATURE, 1952
481. Love is so short, and forgetting so long.
Pablo Neruda
LITERATURE, 1971
482. Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved.
Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915
483. I have tried to keep memory alive . . . I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
484. If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope. Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
485. If the failure of memory irks me, it also intrigues and pleases me. For the process of forgetting can also be a great and subtle pleasure.
Eugene Wigner
PHYSICS, 1963