The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject – as sculptors themselves are fond of saying – is hidden in the block of material.
Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.
Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment.
For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.
When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.
Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form – or else it is not art.