The Impossible Takes Longer (9 page)

486. I have had dreams and I've had nightmares. It is because of my dreams that I have overcome my nightmares.

Linus Pauling
CHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962

487. In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.

LuigiPirandello
LITERATURE, 1934

488. All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Elias Canetti
LITERATURE, 1981

489. Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

William Golding
LITERATURE, 1983

490. Find your own dream. Keep this dream and take good care of it and then sometime you will accomplish something.

KoichiTanaka
CHEMISTRY, 2002

491. You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925

492. There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.

Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938

493. From my earliest youth, I have known that while one is obliged to plan with care the stages of one's journey, one is entitled to dream, and keep dreaming, of its destination. A man may feel as old as his years, yet as young as his dreams.

Shimon Peres
PEACE, 1994

494. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964

PHILOSOPHY

495. The balm that heals the wound of time is called religion; the knowledge that we must live for a lifetime with our wound is called philosophy.

Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990

496. Scientists are explorers, philosophers are tourists.

Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965

497. The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950

498. Roughly, you'd say science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know.

Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950

499.1 have made a great discovery, a very great discovery: all that philosophers have ever written is pure drivel.

Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922

500. That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 195 8

501. There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

ETHICS AND MORALS

502. If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love."

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

503. The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.

Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921

504. Morality must have its roots in conscience, not in dogma.

Franco Modigliani
ECONOMICS, 1985

505.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

T.S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948

506. Personally, I would not judge ethical issues based on absolute rights and wrongs. Whenever you see the word ethics, I see the word politics, which to me means personal, fixed, vested interests.

Sydney Brenner
MEDICINE, 2002

CRITICS AND CRITICISM

507. I have derived continued benefit from criticism at all periods of my life, and I do not remember any time when I was ever short of it.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

508. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906

509. Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930

510. Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962

John Kenneth Galbraith describes a chance meeting with Steinbeck in an airport in 1958, when both were reading a hostile review of Galbraith's
The Affluent Society

WISDOM

511. Wisdom is not in reason, but in love.

André Gide
LITERATURE, 1947

512. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948

513. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990

514. You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Naguib Mahfouz
LITERATURE, 1988

515. Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.

Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906

516. Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people.

William Butler Yeats
LITERATURE, 1923

517. The fool is silent because he has nothing to say. But the wise man is silent because he has too much to say.

Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 198 6

518. A wise man gets wiser by suffering. A person without any wisdom may suffer for a hundred years and die a fool.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978

FANATICISM

519. Just as the clouds cannot stop the light, so religious extremism cannot stop modernization.

Shirin Ebadi
PEACE, 2003

520. From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.

Friedrich von Hayek
ECONOMICS, 1974

521. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

Wole Soyinka
LITERATURE, 1986

522. A few fanatics are not a fundamental problem. No, the problem arises if political fanatics bury themselves within a morally legitimate political movement.

David Trimble
PEACE, 1998

523. A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

524. Education is the most backward of all large industries.

Arthur Lewis
ECONOMICS, 1979

525. There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.

George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925

526. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry; for the delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921

527. I sometimes think it would be better to drown children than to lock them up in present-day schools.

Marie Curie
PHYSICS, 1903; CHEMISTRY, 1911

528. It was fortunate for me that I never in my life had what is called an education.

Rabindranath Tagore
LITERATURE, 1913

529. Nearly 12 years of school . . . form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life . . . a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony . . . I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer's mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer's shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural; it would have taught me more; and I should have done it much better.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

530. The desire to teach is visceral: it requires no defense, it permits no explanation, it is a cultural obligation, it is a vocation. Scholarship and research without the vocation to teach are sterile.

J. Michael Bishop
MEDICINE, 1989

531. Anytime you try to teach the subject without teachers who love the subject, it is doomed to failure and is a foolish thing to do.

Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965

At a local high school, three months before his death

532. Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining.

Herbert Simon
ECONOMICS, 1978

533. The message I would give to young people is: Don't be the best in your class. If you're the best in your class you're in the wrong class.

James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962

534. Being a professor in an American university is the best job in Western civilization.

Leon Lederman
PHYSICS, 1988

535. The typical university catalogue would never stop Diogenes in his search for an honest man.

George Stigler
ECONOMICS, 1982

536. The last really notable advance in college teaching in recent times was the invention of the printing press.

George Stigler
ECONOMICS, 1982

537. I've always thought of universities in a grand way, as seats of learning and inquiry. Well, it's bogus. You get bogus students taking bogus courses in bogus writing.

V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001

538. I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls . . . Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.

T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948

539. Not one of you sitting round this table could run a fish-and-chip shop.

Howard Florey
MEDICINE, 1945