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. "If you got everything you wanted, you wouldn't have everything you need." — Kenneth Goldberg
4. "To the capable goes the work." — Kenneth Goldberg
5. "The flexible bend." — Kenneth Goldberg
6. "The idea that the universe is a giant hologram is interfering with my weekend." — Kenneth Goldberg
7. "CCD Background exposure: it's the new black." — Kenneth Goldberg
8. "If all you have is a microscope, everything looks like a defect." — Kenneth Goldberg via Maslow
9. "To err is human, ⌘-Z sublime." — Kenneth Goldberg
10. "Possession is 9/10ths of the tantrum." — Kenneth Goldberg

11. "There's no sense aging bad wine." — Kenneth Goldberg
12. "Nobody expects a metastable equilibrium." — Kenneth Goldberg
13. "Aberrations cannot hide from the knife." — Kenneth Goldberg, a Foucault
14. "At 10^-7 Torr, no one can hear you scream." — Kenneth Goldberg
15. "I've got 1e99 problems and floating-point roundoff error is 1." — Kenneth Goldberg
16. "Bendable all mirrors are." — Kenneth Goldberg via Yoda
17. "To my toddler son: All good swings must come to an end. " — Kenneth Goldberg
18. "This sentence is worth 0.006 pictures. " — Kenneth Goldberg
19. "If adaptive x-ray optics fails, they will call it, 'maladaptive optics.'" — Kenneth Goldberg
20. "One man's defect is another man's feature." — Kenneth Goldberg

21. "One man's speckle is another man's data." — Kenneth Goldberg
22. "The longest journey begins with a single schlep." — Kenneth Goldberg
23. "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
24. "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces." — Carl Von Clausewitz
25. "No experiment plan survives contact with the beam." — Kenneth Goldberg via Carl Von Clausewitz
26. "No agenda survives first contact with the review committee." — Kenneth Goldberg
27. "Each brick / mortared into place / assumes its role / as the highest point / then spends eternity / supporting others." — Kenneth Goldberg
28. "Faced with a choice, do both." — Dieter Rot (Roth)
29. "You can do anything, but not everything." — David Allen
30. "Throw deep, always." – Tom Hanks

31. "It's not where you take things from--It's where you take them to." — Jean-Luc Godard
32. "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun." — Pablo Picasso
33. "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." — Albert Szent-Gyrgyi
34. "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right." — Henry Ford
35. "Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free." — Richard Avedon
36. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." — Henry David Thoreau
37. "We are always searching. I think that now, we're on the point of finding." — John Coltrane
38. "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." — Rene Magritte
39. "You can see a lot by just observing. " — Yogi Berra
40. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." — Dennis Gabor

41. "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible." — M. C. Escher
42. "There is nothing impossible to him who will try." — Alexander of Macedon
43. "Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about." — Lachlan McLachlan
44. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." — Henry David Thoreau
45. "The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination." — Tommy Lasorda
46. "If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves." – Thomas Alva Edison
47. "You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." – Rabindranath Tagore
48. "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." — Pablo Picasso
49. "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." — Pablo Picasso
50. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." — Gandhi

51. "Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment." — Jim Rohn
52. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." — Will Durant
53. "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." — Thomas A. Edison
54. "All glory comes from daring to begin." — Eugene F. Ware
55. "The secret of life is this: When you hear the sound of the cannons, walk toward them." — Marcel France
56. "The obstacle is the way." — Ryan Holiday, via Marcus Aurelius
57. "We will find a way, or make one." — Hannibal
58. "I work on the motto that if something's not impossible, there must be a way of doing it." — Sir Nicholas Winton
59. "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
60. "Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it; and Virtue is doing it.'" — David Starr Jordan

61. "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
62. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln
63. "Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in." — Bill Bradley
64. "Well done is better than well said." — Benjamin Franklin
65. "...The man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it." — Elbert Hubbard
66. "Action Expresses Priorities. " — Ghandi
67. "Action is the foundational key to all success." — Pablo Picasso
68. "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.
69. "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." — Groucho Marx
70. "You do not really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother." — Albert Einstein

71. "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" — Albert Einstein
72. "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
73. "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." —Albert Einstein
74. "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
75. "Interferometry, like surfing, is a search for the perfect wave. But physicists don't have to paddle around and wait."
    — Kenneth Goldberg
76. "Philosophers say that perfection is unattainable. Lithographers redefine perfection according to SEMI standards."
    — Kenneth Goldberg
77. "Reach(man) > Grasp" — Kenneth Goldberg, à la Browning
78. "There's a fine line between physics and crazy-talk." — Kathryn K. Goldberg
79. "My female intuition trumps your science every day." — Kathryn K. Goldberg
80. "Sometimes the best thing you can do for something is nothing." — Kathryn K. Goldberg

81. "Remember, before the internet, you had to just sit there and wonder." — Kathryn K. Goldberg
82. "Rule: People push buttons." — Kathryn K. Goldberg
83. "Nobody's safe around a writer" — Lanford Wilson
84. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." — William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1-V
85. "Everything is linear, to first order." — A physicist maxim
86. "Life is too important to take seriously." — Hector Medecki (and maybe Oscar Wilde?)
87. "One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." — Buddha (also Marie Curie)
88. "...We are further removed from a deeper insight into elementary processes than most of our contemporaries believe...." — Albert Einstein
89. "...Life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep on moving." — Albert Einstein
90. "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." — Albert Einstein

91. "Adventure is hardship aesthetically considered." — Barry Targan
92. "If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture." — Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder
93. "The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them." — Joseph Henry
94. "Quod Natura Munimento Inviderat Industria Adiecit
    (What nature guards jealously, hard work has addressed)."— Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (Orvieto)
95. "I am proud to be a heretic.... If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic. — Freeman Dyson
96. "New truths become evident when new tools become available." — Rosalyn Yalow
97. "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures." — Henry Ward Beecher
98. "Given enough coffee, I could rule the world." — Author Unknown
99. "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again." — F. P. Jones
100. "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." — Samuel Johnson

101. "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
102. "Maxwell mnemonic
     del dot E is rho
     del dot B equals zero
     No source for confusion." — Paul Tandy
103. "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
104. "But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up ten." — Roz Savage via Proverbs 24:16
105. "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
106. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." — Samuel Beckett
107. "Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean that you don't have to keep time." — Theloneous Monk to Steve Lacey
108. "When you're swinging, swing some more!" — Theloneous Monk to Steve Lacey
109. "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." — Samuel Johnson
110. "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." — Carl Sagan

111. "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
112. "Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable." — Kurt Vonnegut
113. "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men—true nobility is being superior to your former self." — Ernest Hemmingway
114. "Newton's 3rd law corollary: For every shortcut, there is an equal and opposite disaster." — Anonymous
115. "Physics is much too hard for physicists." — David Hilbert
116. "Clem (Clementa Pinckney) understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves, in each other." — Barack Obama
117. "(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
118. "It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. " — Galileo Galilei
119. "'It can't happen here' is number one on the list of famous last words. " — David Crosby
120. "The stronger you become, the gentler you will be." — Thich Nhat Hanh

121. "The meaning of life is to give life meaning." — Viktor Frankl
122. "What is to give light must endure burning." — Viktor Frankl
123. "He who sweats more in training bleeds less in war." — Spartan Warrior Creed
124. "If it is to be, it is up to me. " — Cory Booker
125. "Almost everyone is more interesting at 1.5x speed." — Chris Mack
126. "He has the gift and the ability to say things that, um, seem vague but are in reality meaningless." — Karl Reiner as Rob Petrie.
127. "We're always one minus sign away from disaster." — Farhad Salmassi
128. "The only free cheese is in the mousetrap." — Russian Proverb via Valeriy Yashchuk
129. "Everything that happens is ironclad proof of my confirmation bias." — Kenneth Goldberg
130. "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

131. "There's a new security update for Windows users: It's called Macintosh." — Ta-dum
132. "It's easy to make things complex; the complexity is in making things easy." — Fortune Cookie

All photos ©Kenneth A. Goldberg 2003-26.