Quotations

My favorite quotations and such.

1. "The lyfe so short; the craft so long to lerne." — Chaucer

2. "If the wind will not serve, take to the oars." — Latin proverb

3. "Art and science have their meeting point in method." — Edward Bulwer-Lytton
"Art and science have their real meeting point in trying to make the printer work." — Kenneth Goldberg

4. "Interferometry, like surfing, is a search for the perfect wave. But physicists don't have to paddle around and wait."
Kenneth Goldberg

5. "Philosophers say that perfection is unattainable. Lithographers redefine perfection according to SEMI standards."
Kenneth Goldberg

6. "Reach(man) > Grasp" — Kenneth Goldberg, à la Browning

7. "If you got everything you wanted, you wouldn't have everything you need." — Kenneth Goldberg

8. "To the capable goes the work." — Kenneth Goldberg

9. "The flexible bend." — Kenneth Goldberg

10. "The idea that the universe is a giant hologram is interfering with my weekend." — Kenneth Goldberg

11. "CCD Background exposure: it's the new black." — Kenneth Goldberg

12. "If all you have is a microscope, everything looks like a defect." — Kenneth Goldberg via Maslow

13. "To err is human, ⌘-Z sublime." — Kenneth Goldberg

14. "Possession is 9/10ths of the tantrum." — Kenneth Goldberg

15. "There's no sense aging bad wine." — Kenneth Goldberg

16. "Nobody expects a metastable equilibrium." — Kenneth Goldberg

17. "Aberrations cannot hide from the knife." — Kenneth Goldberg, a Foucault

18. "At 10-7 Torr, no one can hear you scream." — Kenneth Goldberg

19. "I've got 1e99 problems and floating-point roundoff error is 1." — Kenneth Goldberg

20. "Bendable all mirrors are." — Kenneth Goldberg via Yoda

21. "To my toddler son: All good swings must come to an end. " — Kenneth Goldberg

22. "This sentence is worth 0.006 pictures. " — Kenneth Goldberg

23. "If adaptive x-ray optics fails, they will call it, 'maladaptive optics.'" — Kenneth Goldberg

24. "One man's defect is another man's feature." — Kenneth Goldberg

25. "The longest journey begins with a single schlep." — Kenneth Goldberg

26. "When two flexible cords, of lengths L1 and L2, rest on a surface for time T, the probability that they will become intertwined is 1. At the molecular scale, I posit this as the origin of life." — Kenneth Goldberg

27. "No experiment plan survives contact with the beam." — Kenneth Goldberg via Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

28. "No agenda survives first contact with the review committee." — Kenneth Goldberg

29. "Each brick / mortared into place / assumes its role / as the highest point / then spends eternity / supporting others." — Kenneth Goldberg

30. "Everything that happens is ironclad proof of my confirmation bias." — Kenneth Goldberg

31. "There's a fine line between physics and crazy-talk." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

32. "My female intuition trumps your science every day." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

33. "Sometimes the best thing you can do for something is nothing." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

34. "Remember, before the internet, you had to just sit there and wonder." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

35. "Rule: People push buttons." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

36. "Everything is linear, to first order." — A physicist maxim

37. "Life is too important to take seriously." — Hector Medecki (and maybe Oscar Wilde?)

38. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." — Will Durant

39. "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." — Albert Szent-Gyrgyi

40. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln

41. "One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." — Buddha (also Marie Curie)

42. "There's a new security update for Windows users: It's called Macintosh." — Ta-dum

43. "Faced with a choice, do both." — Dieter Rot (Roth)

44. "...We are further removed from a deeper insight into elementary processes than most of our contemporaries believe...." — Albert Einstein

45. "...Life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep on moving." — Albert Einstein

46. "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." — Albert Einstein

47. "You do not really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother." — Albert Einstein

48. "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" — Albert Einstein

49. "Three rules of work: 1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 2. From discord, find harmony. 3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." —Albert Einstein

50. "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." —Albert Einstein

51. "Adventure is hardship aesthetically considered." — Barry Targan

52. "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." — Groucho Marx

53. "If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture." — Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

54. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." — Gandhi

55. "The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them." — Joseph Henry

56. "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right." — Henry Ford

57. "Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free." — Richard Avedon

58. "Quod Natura Munimento Inviderat Industria Adiecit
(What nature guards jealously, hard work has addressed)."— Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (Orvieto)

59. "I am proud to be a heretic.... If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic. — Freeman Dyson

60. "New truths become evident when new tools become available." — Rosalyn Yalow

61. "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures." — Henry Ward Beecher

62. "Given enough coffee, I could rule the world." — Author Unknown

63. "The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year." — John Foster Dulles

64. "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again." — F. P. Jones

65. "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." — Samuel Johnson

66. "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible." — M. C. Escher

67. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." — Dennis Gabor

68. "If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists—to protect them and to promote their common welfare—all else is lost." — Barack Obama

69. "It's not where you take things from—It's where you take them to." — Jean-Luc Godard

70. "Maxwell mnemonic
del dot E is rho
del dot B equals zero
No source for confusion." — Paul Tandy

71. "Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment." — Jim Rohn

72. "Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction—from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." — Vince Lipsio

73. "There is nothing impossible to him who will try." — Alexander of Macedon

74. "Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about." — Lachlan McLachlan

75. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." — Henry David Thoreau

76. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." — Henry David Thoreau

77. "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'" — Mary Anne Radmacher

78. "Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it; and Virtue is doing it.'" — David Starr Jordan

79. "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." — Pablo Picasso

80. "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun." — Pablo Picasso

81. "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." — Pablo Picasso

82. "I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career – it’s a life!" — Steve Jobs

83. "Nobody's safe around a writer" — Lanford Wilson

84. "Well done is better than well said." — Benjamin Franklin

85. "We're always one minus sign away from disaster." — Farhad Salmassi

86. "The only free cheese is in the mousetrap." — Russian Proverb via Valeriy Yashchuk

87. "But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up ten." — Roz Savage via Proverbs 24:16

88. "Fall down seven times, get up eight 七転び八起き "Nana korobi ya oki" (literally: seven falls, eight getting up)" — Japanese proverb via Presentation Zen

89. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." — Samuel Beckett

90. "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." — Samuel Johnson

91. "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." — Carl Sagan

92. "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." — Thomas A. Edison

93. "All glory comes from daring to begin." — Eugene F. Ware

94. "You can do anything, but not everything." — David Allen

95. "Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable." — Kurt Vonnegut

96. "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men—true nobility is being superior to your former self." — Ernest Hemmingway

97. "No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy." — Carl Von Clausewitz

98. "Newton's 3rd law corollary: For every shortcut, there is an equal and opposite disaster." — Anonymous

99. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." — William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1-V

100. "Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in." — Bill Bradley

101. "I work on the motto that if something's not impossible, there must be a way of doing it." — Sir Nicholas Winton

102. "Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

103. "Action is the foundational key to all success." — Pablo Picasso

104. "Physics is much too hard for physicists." — David Hilbert

105. "Clem (Clementa Pinckney) understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves, in each other." — Barack Obama

106. "Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean that you don't have to keep time." — Theloneous Monk to Steve Lacey

107. "When you're swinging, swing some more!" — Theloneous Monk to Steve Lacey

108. "We are always searching. I think that now, we're on the point of finding." — John Coltrane

109. "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." — Rene Magritte

110. "(On Physics) It's not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you're tired you sleep, and when you're not, you do physics." — Sabrina Pasterski

111. "The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination." — Tommy Lasorda

112. "We will find a way, or make one." — Hannibal

113. "Throw deep, always." – Tom Hanks

114. "If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves." – Thomas Alva Edison

115. "You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." – Rabindranath Tagore

116. "It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. " — Galileo Galilei

117. "Action Expresses Priorities. " — Ghandi

118. "You can see a lot by just observing. " — Yogi Berra

119. "'It can't happen here' is number one on the list of famous last words. " — David Crosby

120. "If it is to be, it is up to me. " — Cory Booker

121. "He who sweats more in training bleeds less in war." — Spartan Warrior Creed

122. "The secret of life is this: When you hear the sound of the cannons, walk toward them." — Marcel France

123. "The stronger you become, the gentler you will be." — Thich Nhat Hanh

124. "The meaning of life is to give life meaning." — Viktor Frankl

125. "What is to give light must endure burning." — Viktor Frankl

126. "He who sweats more in training bleeds less in war." — Spartan Warrior Creed

127. "The secret of life is this: When you hear the sound of the cannons, walk toward them." — Marcel France

128. "The obstacle is the way." — Ryan Holiday, via Marcus Aurelius

129. "Almost everyone is more interesting at 1.5x speed." — Chris Mack

130. "He has the gift and the ability to say things that, um, seem vague but are in reality meaningless." — Karl Reiner as Rob Petrie.

131. "When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid / The new dawn blooms as we free it / For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it / If only we’re brave enough to be it." — Amanda Gorman

132. "It's easy to make things complex; the complexity is in making things easy." — Fortune Cookie

All photos ©Kenneth A. Goldberg 2003-23.