The Upright Thinkers Quotes

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Robert Frost wrote in 1914, “Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.

Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.

research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.

Upon learning of the young man’s interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, “In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.

paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies—and died younger—than the populations of human foragers who preceded them.

Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years,” and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, “That’s exactly what I mean about wasting your time.

regulations allow for up to ten insect fragments per thirty-one-gram serving.

Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites,

while a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.

a thousand years without a bath.

in 1904 he applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class and was turned down.

Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.

It is always heartening when a fundamentalist of any religion professes a belief in evolution,

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

They required three thousand Jews, the man said, and the line had apparently held 3,004.

the destination was the local cemetery, where everyone was ordered to dig a mass grave and then was shot dead and buried in it.

My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.

Heisenberg, who was attempting to hold German physics together, resented Schrödinger’s departure, “since he was neither Jewish nor otherwise endangered.

The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

they left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. “You will never see it again,” he told her.

Born, barred from teaching and worried about the ongoing harassment of his children, also immediately sought to leave Germany.

1943 Bohr was tipped off by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that he faced immediate arrest as part of the plan to deport all of Denmark’s Jews.

Instead, like Heisenberg, his priority seemed to be to preserve as much of German science as possible, while complying with all Nazi laws and regulations.

One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled “crackpot,” and the other “visionary.

I wouldn’t have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.

German authorities saw the need for a statute explicitly forbidding anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine,

Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.

if a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or too quickly, they would jeer and become rowdy.

Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.

Newton was “not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.

the invention of mummification. This was believed to be the key to a happy afterlife; certainly there were no disgruntled customers coming back to say otherwise.

Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or “Wise, Wise Man.

(Your own species ends up with a name like that when you get to choose it

Pauli turned to the audience and argued, “Yes, my theory is crazy enough!” Then Bohr insisted, “No, your theory is not crazy enough!

discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.

I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.

It all began when the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn’t kill him, died of gangrene.

A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two

A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.

Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn’t associate with weirdos.

volatile green lion in the central salt of Venus and distill. This spirit is the green lion the blood of the green lion Venus, the Babylonian Dragon that kills everything with its poison, but conquered by being assuaged by the Doves of Diana, it is the Bond of Mercury.

Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical to science as we know it today.

Don't strive to be a leader, strive to be a server. Don't strive to be a general, strive to be a commander. Don't strive to be a teacher, strive to be a learner. Don't strive to be a warrior, strive to be a protector. Don't strive to be a prophet, strive to be a preacher. Don't strive to be a doctor, strive to be a healer. Don't strive to be a master, strive to be a learner. Don't strive to be an author, strive to be a reader. Don't strive to be a lecturer, strive to be a scholar. Don't strive to be an intellectual, strive to be a thinker. Not all of us were meant to teach, but all of us were meant to learn. Not all of us were meant to lead, but all of us were meant to serve. Not all of us were meant to be rich, but all of us were meant to be charitable. Not all of us were meant to be famous, but all of us were meant to be upright. Not all of us were meant to be mighty, but all of us were meant to persevere. Not all of us were meant to be extraordinary, but all of us were meant to prevail.

Albert Einstein wrote, “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Reflection does not coincide with what is constituted but grasps only the essence of it...it does not take the place of inten tional life in an act of pure production but only reproduces the outline of it. Husserl always presents the "return to absolute consciousness" as a title for a multitude of operations which are learned, gradually effected, and never completed. We are never wholly one with constitutive genesis; we barely manage to accompany it for short segments. What is it then which responds to our reconstitution from (if these words have a meaning ) the other side of things? From our own side, there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity. We constitute constituting consciousness by dint of rare and difficult efforts. It is the presumptive or alleged subject of our attempts. The author, Valery said, is the instantaneous thinker of works which were slow and laborious—and this thinker is nowhere. As the author is for VaIery the impostor of the writer, constituting consciousness is the philosopher's professional impostor. In any case, for Husserl it is the artifact the teleology of intentional life ends up at—and not the Spinozist attribute of Thought. Originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl's thought matures, a means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted. This senseless effort to submit everything to the proprieties of "consciousness" (to the limpid play of its attitudes, intentions, and impositions of meaning) was necessary—the picture of a well-behaved World left to us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the limit--in order to reveal all that was left over: these beings beneath our idealizations and objectifications which secretly nourish them and in which we have difficulty recognizing noema... Willy-nilly, against his plans and according to his essential audacity, Husserl awakens a wild-flowering world and mind. Things are no longer there simply according to their projective appearances and the requirements of the panorama, as in Renaissance perspective; but on the contrary upright, insistent, flaying our glance with their edges, each thing claiming an absolute presence which is not compossible with the absolute presence of other things, and which they nevertheless have all together by virtue of a configurational meaning which is in no way indicated by its 'theoretical meaning.

At the University of Bologna, there was another bizarre twist on what is the norm today: students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions.

In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn’t invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an “hour” might be more than twice as long in June as in December (in London, for example, it varied from 38 to 82 of today’s minutes).

Little is known about Boyle’s mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by then must have come as a relief.

The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we’ve achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature.

Today we know that gas as carbon dioxide. Priestley had inadvertently invented a way to create carbonated beverages, but alas, since he was a man of modest means, he didn’t commercialize his invention. That was done a few years later by one Johann Jacob Schweppe, whose soda company is still in business today.

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical

first no one knew exactly how to interpret,

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993

Tatăl meu mi-a povestit odată de un tovarăş de detenţie emaciat, din lagărul de concentrare de la Buchenwald, care era de formaţie matematician. Poţi spune unele lucruri despre oameni după ceea ce le vine în minte când aud cuvântul "pi". Pentru un "matematician", "pi" reprezintă raportul dintre circumferinţa şi diametrul unui cerc. Dacă l-aş fi întrebat pe tatăl meu, care avea doar şapte clase, ar fi spus că "pi" este o plăcintă rotundă, cu mere. Într-o zi, în pofida discrepanţei dintre ei, deţinutul matematician i-a dat tatălui meu să rezolve o enigmă matematică. Tatăl meu s-a gândit la ea timp de câteva zile, dar nu a reuşit să-i dea de capăt. Când s-a întâlnit din nou cu matematicianul, i-a cerut soluţia. Omul nu a vrut să i-o dea, zicându-i că trebuie s-o găsească el însuşi. După câtva timp, tatăl meu l-a rugat din nou, dar omul ţinea la secretul său ca la ochii din cap. Tatăl meu a încercat să-şi ignore curiozitatea, dar nu a putut. Înconjurat de duhoare şi moarte, el a făcut o obsesie pentru cunoaşterea răspunsului. Până la urmă, celălalt deţinut i-a propus un târg - el îi va dezvălui soluţia enigmei în schimbul colţului lui de pâine. Nu ştiu ce greutate avea tatăl meu atunci, dar când trupele americane au eliberat lagărul, el cântărea 38 de kilograme. Cu toate acestea, dorinţa lui de a şti a fost atât de puternică, încât a renunţat la pâine în schimbul răspunsului. Aveam aproapre douăzeci de ani când tatăl meu mi-a povestit episodul acesta, care a avut un impact enorm asupra mea. Familia tatălui meu pierise, bunurile îi fuseseră confiscate, el însuşi era înfometat, emaciat şi bătut. Naziştii îl despuiaseră de tot ce era palpabil, şi totuşi imboldul lui de a gândi, de a raţiona şi de a cunoaşte supravieţuise. Deşi era întemniţat, mintea îi era liberă să cutreiere, şi aşa a şi făcut. Am înţeles atunci că a căuta cunoaşterea este cea mai omenească dintre toate dorinţele şi că, oricât de diferite ar fi circumstanţele noastre, pasiunea mea de a înţelege lumea a fost stimulată de acelaşi instinct ca şi a tatălui meu.