MY QUOTES COLLECTION
SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE
“The scientist must feel more attraction for the new and unusual, than for what can be stored in the pigeonholes we have prepared.”
Ramón Margalef
“Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning, dangerous.”
Confucius
“The true glory of man is science, and peace his true happiness.”
Compte de Buffon
“Dauer im Wechsel / Permanence in change.”
Wolfgang Göethe
“Science is like the earth, you can only own a part of it.”
Voltaire
“Laws of thermodynamics: 1. You can’t win. 2. You can´t break even. 3. You can’t get out of the game.”
Anonymous
“I find it [Science] analytical, pretentious, superficial; largely because it does not account for dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, and paradoxes; that what I love most.”
Luis Buñuel
“Ignorance separates men, sciences unites them.”
Louis Pasteur
“Art disturbs; science reassures.”
G. Braque
“The truths that science reveals always surpass the dreams it destroys…”
J. E. Renan
“A system progresses when it gains more independence from its environment”
Jorge Wagensberg
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Where is the information we have lost in data? Where the data we have lost in noise?”
T. S. Eliot
“Knowledge is not happiness, and science is merely exchanging a kind of ignorance with another.”
Lord Byron
“Repeatedly I told myself that there is no other enigma than time, that infinite web of yesterday, today, the future, the ever and never.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“Man: Hey, boy, which is your dog´s name?. Boy: I do not know. We call him Rover.”
Stafford Beer (New Scientist, 1973)
“A man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
Mark Twain
“Nothing is more terrible than watching ignorance in action.”
J. W. Goethe
“Intelligence is that faculty of the mind that allows you to discover the order in a situation considered confusing.”
Haneef A. Fatmi & Robert W. Young (Nature, 1970)
“Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and where it lands painting a target.
Homer Atkins (Nature, 1984)
“The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
Henry van Dyke
“Know in order to predict and predict in order to act”
Auguste Compte
“Being right too soon is just as wrong”.
Margaritte Yourcenar (Memorias de Adriano)
“Useless information only differs from nonsense in that it gives a lot more work.”
Swedish Proverb
“The more information we consumed, the greater the mental control exerted upon us by information being a representation of the world as opposed to the direct experience of it.”
Al Gore (Earth at stake)
“Science progresses more by milestones followed by pauses, than by the progressive accumulation of small discoveries.”
Thomas Kuhn
“To see something we must understand it. The armchair presupposes the human body, joints and parts… The scissors, the act of cutting.”
Jorge Luis Borges
“But it is important to distinguish between reductionism as a research tactic and reductionism as a philosophy -the latter is the folly of modernism, the former is a necessity of science.”
R. Levins & R Lewontin (The dialectical biologist)
“The universe is neither hostile nor friendly, it is simply indifferent.”
Hughes John Homes
“Life has a gas soul, it tends to occupy all available space, victim of a territorial voracity with no kind of restrain.”
Ramon Folch
“Life is a complex adaptive system subject to ecological operations, whose expression is biodiversity.”
A. Machado, 1996
“A species settles down where it can if it is allowed to do so.”
A. Machado, 1999
“Small is beautiful, but big is powerful.”
Ken Thompson
“Things are transformed into one another according to necessity and they do justice to each other according to the order of time.”
Anaximandro
“You do not really understand something unless you’re able to explain it to your grandmother.”
Albert Einstein
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
“I believe in cafes, in the dialogue; I believe in the dignity of people, in freedom. I feel nostalgia, almost anxiety for an Infinite, but human, shaped to our measure…”
Ernesto Sabato
“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.”
Albert Einstein
“My conscience has more weight for me than the opinion of the whole world.”
Cicero
“Do not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same. The crisis is the greatest blessing that can happen to people and countries because crisis brings progress.”
Albert Einstein
“Man is the most foolish species, he worships an invisible God and destroys a visible nature, unawere that his nature he is destroying is this invisible God he’s worshipping.”
Hubert Reeves
“Beware of the man of a single book.”
Tomás de Aquino
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
Seneca
“Having the worst of diseases, is to be unaware of being sick.”
José Ortega y Gasset
“Aim before firing at the target. When you are sure, do not fire yet. At the end you are so confident that you will not longer need to shoot.”
Joan Brossa
“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretense to make it live.”
Josef Conrad (Lord Jim)
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
Albert Einstein
“Adversity reveals genius; prosperity conceals it.”
Horacio
“Nothing returns to the past, except our nostalgia that evokes memories seasoned with beauty and security.”
A. Machado (Catorce días)
“If you do not know where you’re going, you will probably end up in the wrong place.”
Graffiti (French May, 1968)
“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
Charles Darwin
“Optimism is to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”
Winston Churchill
“It is as if perfection is reached not when everything is added, but when there is nothing more to be suppressed.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Probieren geht über studieren /The proof will be in the pudding”
German proverb
“Every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.”
Marco Aurelio
“Be tolerant with others and strict with yoursel”
Marco Aurelio
Business without ethics is like sex without love; it has no grace.
A. Machado, 1998
“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Ulysses)
“Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.”
Jacob Bronowski
“Efforts without results produce melancholy.”
Winston Churchill [?]
Mens sana, in corpore et natura sana.
A. Machado, 2015
POLITICS AND JUSTICE
Civilization will reach maturity once religion is surpassed.
A. Machado, 2006
“The single most important contribution any of us can make to the planet is to return to frugality.”
Robert Muller (Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations)
There is no eco-crunch, but rather an environmental crisis.
A. Machado, 1999
“My purpose was only to reduce the leafy mass of contradictions and abuse that ultimately convert the law and procedures in a thicket where honest people do not dare to venture, while the robbers prosper under his shelter.”
Marguerite Youcernar (Memoirs of Hadrian)
“When doubt and hypocrisy are in power, the decision of the innocents is retirement.”
Isaac Newton
“Be a prince who wants to act always good, when in fact he is surrounded by people who are not good, cannot but walk toward ruin. It is therefore necessary for a prince who wishes to remain able to learn to not be good, and to use or not this power as the circumstances require.”
Machiavelli (The Prince)
“In politics success only those who place the sail where the wind blows; never those who pretend that the wind blows where they place the sail.”
Antonio Madchado (the poet, not me)
“Politics is like figure skating, but the skating rink is of shit.”
Antonio Carrillo Carballo (my grandfather)
“We [Spaniards] suffer a tendency to alienate responsibilities, to refer to others what we should solve by ourselves.”
Fernando Lázaro Carreter
“No one can do a greater mistake than hewho did nothing because he could only do a little.”
Edmund Burke
“Where there is no publicity; the truth shines.”
Ovidio
“Facts are sacred and opinions free.”
English journalist tradition
“In the treacherous world nothing is truth or a lie: everything is the eye of the beholder”
Ramón de Campoamor
“Things will not change by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Richard Buckminster Fuller
“All people claim the same: Dignity, opportunity and justice”
Rheza Pahlavi (Jr.)
“When we had the answer, they changed the question.”
Grafitti in Bogota quoted by Ramon Folch (El vicio de mirar)
HUMOUR
“Forgive me for not standing.”
Groucho Marx (Suggested epitaph)
Principle of Saint Perseverio. Be San Perseverio the patron saint of the Holy Inertia, and the Holy Inertia the trend of natural and human phenomena to stay on its heels, it will be necessary to apply a sufficient amount and nothing despicable intention and energy so that these phenomena alter their course of bloody once and damn.
A. Machado, 2000
“Last night, on the moon, I saw clearly drawn a dragon with feathers. I should drink less.”
Les Luthiers
“A consultant is someone who takes your wrist watch, tells you the time and charges you for it.”
D. Capusotto (comedian)
The three updated duties of life: plant many trees, have half a child, and … please!… do not write more books!
A. Machado, 2003
“AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT IS WORTH A THOUSAND INSIGNIFICANT QUOTES”
Diogenes
