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It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
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Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
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It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
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Terry Pratchett (Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind, #3))
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When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.
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Neal Stephenson
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You may think yellow is a color, but it isn’t. It’s a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.
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Daniel Todd Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness)
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Once twin flames begin to spiritually vibrate on the same wavelength, they will find their calling in this life will have a ripple effect on everyone here on earth. Many twin flame couples feel called to philanthropic, spiritual, religious, or other work where they will be guiding other souls toward enlightenment. Getting on the same wavelength, however, is not always easy. As mentioned before, twin flames experience an overload of sensations and emotions that are outside of the spectrum of human senses.
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Abigail Konstantine (Twin Flames and Soulmates Exposed: The Journey to Unconditional Love, Fulfilling Your Soul’s Purpose, and Reuniting with Your Spiritual Partner (Twin Flame Union))
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See, J, it doesn't work,' he said. 'The way everyone pretends to be on the same wavelength without questioning or talking about things -- it doesn't get anyone anywhere. I hate to say it, but . . . I feel like I've been hanging around that kind of world too damn long.
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Haruki Murakami (Pinball, 1973 (The Rat, #2))
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It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works— that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
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Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
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If we put aside the self-awareness standard -- and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to) -- it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness' pointed out that those 'neurological substrates' necessary for consciousness (whatever 'consciousness' is) belong to 'all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.' The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.
"The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,' in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of 'animal consciousness' ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about 'that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.' Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when 'there is something that it is to be that organism -- something it islike for the organism.' The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels likethis; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.
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John Jeremiah Sullivan
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One of the people working with Rutherford was a mild and affable young Dane named Niels Bohr. In 1913, while puzzling over the structure of the atom, Bohr had an idea so exciting that he postponed his honeymoon to write what became a landmark paper. Because physicists couldn’t see anything so small as an atom, they had to try to work out its structure from how it behaved when they did things to it, as Rutherford had done by firing alpha particles at foil. Sometimes, not surprisingly, the results of these experiments were puzzling. One puzzle that had been around for a long time had to do with spectrum readings of the wavelengths of hydrogen. These produced patterns showing that hydrogen atoms emitted energy at certain wavelengths but not others. It was rather as if someone under surveillance kept turning up at particular locations but was never observed traveling between them. No one could understand why this should be.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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In Bohr’s model of the atom, electrons could change their orbits (or, more precisely, their stable standing wave patterns) only by certain quantum leaps. De Broglie’s thesis helped explain this by conceiving of electrons not just as particles but also as waves. Those waves are strung out over the circular path around the nucleus. This works only if the circle accommodates a whole number—such as 2 or 3 or 4—of the particle’s wavelengths; it won’t neatly fit in the prescribed circle if there’s a fraction of a wavelength left over. De Broglie made three typed copies of his thesis and sent one to his adviser, Paul Langevin, who was Einstein’s friend (and Madame Curie’s). Langevin, somewhat baffled, asked for another copy to send along to Einstein, who praised the work effusively. It had, Einstein said, “lifted a corner of the great veil.” As de Broglie proudly noted, “This made Langevin accept my work.”47 Einstein made his own contribution when he received in June of that year a paper in English from a young physicist from India named Satyendra Nath Bose. It derived Planck’s blackbody radiation law by treating radiation as if it were a cloud of gas and then applying a statistical method of analyzing it. But there was a twist: Bose said that any two photons that had the same energy state were absolutely indistinguishable, in theory as well as fact, and should not be treated separately in the statistical calculations.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp.
There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.
One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust.
Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.
The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.
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Greg Egan (Diaspora)
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Loomis was largely responsible for the committee's wholehearted sponsoring of microwave radar research. The army was skeptical, believing that microwave radar was 'for the next war, not this one." The army had already worked to improve its transmitting tubes so that the wavelength could be reduced to 1 1/2 meters and thought anything much shorter than that could not be perfected anytime soon. Given how slow they had been to capitalize on new technology in the past, Loomis regarded the army's attitude as more a reflection on their own bureaucracy than those posed by the research challenge.
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Jennet Conant (Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II)
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You’ve come a long way,” Liv said. “You never cared about the riding stable horses back home.”
“Those horses weren’t Cisco,” Sophie grinned.
They led Cisco and Cactus Jack to the corral, slipped off their halters and watched them sink gratefully to the ground and roll like two large puppies in the sand. “There goes all our hard work.” Liv laughed. “Dirty as ever.”
“Cisco’s wonderful,” Sophie said. “I can trust him. We’re on the same wavelength. Maybe he wasn’t a special horse till I started riding him. Maybe I wasn’t a very good rider. But together we’re good.
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Sharon Siamon (Coyote Canyon (Wild Horse Creek, #2))
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I like pink because it's our eyes not seeing any other color, so it's just sort of makes it up. It’s more violet than the shortest visible wavelength, yet more red than the longest wavelength. How does that work, lol?
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Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
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Originators, however, do not merely master functionalities and use them once and finally in their great creation. What always precedes invention is a lengthy period of accumulating functionalities and of experimenting with them on small problems as five-finger exercises. Often in this period of working with functionalities you can see hints of what originators will use. Five years before his revelation, Charles Townes had argued in a memo that microwave radio "has now been extended to such short wavelengths that it overlaps a region rich in molecular resonances, where quantum mechanical theory and spectroscopic techniques can provide aids to radio engineering." Molecular resonance was exactly what he would use to invent the maser.
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W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves)
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Listen up, nerd,” he said, glancing over his shoulder while I wrapped myself against his back. “Man, you feel good like that.”
“Your huge brain is working at a wavelength I don’t understand. Repeat what you just said in a dumb way so I’ll understand what my being a nerd has to do with you liking this,” I said, wiggling my hips against him before raking his back with my breasts.
After giving me a groan followed by a naughty grin, Cooper sighed. “I can’t even remember what the hell we were talking about,” he said, wrapping my arms tighter around him. “Oh, yeah, you being a nerd. So don’t worry about getting carded. The Kirk in Whiskey Kirk’s is my pop and he doesn’t care if you get wasted. He doesn’t believe in laws.”
“I’m not drinking.”
“Farah, you need to relax and enjoy life.”
“I come from a long line of drunks and addicts, so I’m not relaxing and enjoying life if it means I become like my loser relatives.”
Cooper glanced back at me and smiled. “Did you take a shower before I showed up because you’re hella feisty?”
“Do they have good food at this bar?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Burgers, hot wings, only the best bar food in Kentucky. You just keep holding on while I see if I can concentrate with your tits pushed up against me like that.”
“I had them pushed up the other night and you concentrated fine.”
“That’s because you were wearing your uniform and I forgot you had tits. No forgetting today.”
“If you ever want to be friends with them, you really need to stop calling them tits. They don’t like that.”
“Yes, mam,” he said, laughing as he pushed off and drove away from the apartment.
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Bijou Hunter (Damaged and the Beast (Damaged, #1))
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The way color works, though, is that we see only wavelengths of light that objects cannot smoothly absorb, and instead reject and throw back. Yellow is the hue least harmonious to a banana. We also see everything upside down, and our brains expend a lot of energy rebuilding the world right side up.
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Michael Finkel (The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession)
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more she responses to his signals for re-engagement, the more synchronized are their actions. At times, emotional mirroring between mother and infant can be synchronized within milliseconds. “On the same-wavelength” becomes more than a metaphor, the intersubjective internal state of both mother and infant converge, and the infant’s emotionally reality is both validated and held safely through his mother’s ability to be with his feelings. During this process a mother inevitably makes mistakes, and then the interaction becomes asynchronous. However, when asynchrony arises, a good-enough mother is quick to shift her state so that she can then help to re-regulate her infant, who is likely to be stressed and upset by their mismatch. Indeed, relational moments of rupture and repair allow the child to tolerate negative affect. Additionally, Sieff asked Schore to talk about internal models that are created as a result of interactions between mother and infant. Schore explained that in response to their caregivers, infants create unconscious working models of strategies of affect regulation in order to cope with relational stressors in the attachment relationship. These models are then generalized and applied not only to a mother but also to other people. For instance, if a caregiver is mostly attuned to the infant’s basic needs and is emotionally available, the infant creates an implicit expectation of being matched by, and is more likely able to match another human’s states. The child is likely to form a secure attachment. Similarly, moments of misattunement, if repaired in a sensitive and timely manner, lead the infant to implicitly believe that caring others will calm him when he is upset. This is the first step towards developing a sense of agency. The timely repair of misattunement also teaches an infant that instances of discourse and negative emotions are tolerable. Emotional resilience is thus key to creating an inner feeling of security and trust. On the other hand, if caregivers are chronically not attuned, an infant will create an internal model which dictates that other
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Eva Rass (The Allan Schore Reader: Setting the course of development)
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Imagine you were composing a symphony, and you’d written it down by hand onto sheet music, of which you have only one copy. If you wanted to experiment with the theme, you’d be crazy to write over the only copy you have, and risk messing it up with something that doesn’t work. You’d photocopy it, and use that one to play around, while making sure the original was preserved intact as a back-up. That’s not a bad way to think about genome duplications. A working gene is constrained by being useful, and is not free to mutate at random, as most mutations are likely to be deleterious. But if you duplicate a whole section of DNA containing that gene, the copy is free to change and maybe acquire a new role, without the host losing the function of the original. That’s how a primate ancestor of ours went from two-colour vision to three – a gene on the X chromosome encodes a protein that sits in the retina and reacts to a specific wavelength of light, and thus enables detection of a specific colour. By thirty million years ago, this had duplicated, and mutated sufficiently that blue had been added to our vision. This process has to happen during meiosis, where sperm and eggs are formed, if the new function is to be potentially permanent, as the new mutation will be inherited in every cell of the offspring, including the cells that will become the sperm or eggs. Primates seem prone to genome duplication, and the great apes particularly. Something like 5 per cent of our genome has come about from duplications of chunks of DNA, and about a third of that is unique to us. Duplicated
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Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us)
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As will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters, for the vast majority of Earth history, photosynthetic organisms were limited to aquatic environments, and a green pigment works very well in aquatic environments because blue and red wavelengths penetrate water better than green. Land plants are green because their aquatic ancestors were green, and why else would land plants have an aquatic-adapted photosynthetic pigment?
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Joseph E. Armstrong (How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants)
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Such duplications often happen when cells divide and DNA is copied. They’re mistakes, but fortuitous ones, for they provide a redundant copy of a gene that evolution can tinker with without disrupting the work of the original. That’s exactly what happened with the long-opsin gene. One of the two copies stayed roughly the same, absorbing light at 560 nanometers. The other gradually shifted to a shorter wavelength of 530 nanometers, becoming what we now call the medium (green) opsin.
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Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us)
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Wavelength: What wavelengths does the device offer? Do these have health benefits? Are they in the proven ranges of 600-700nm and 780-1070nm, or better, the most researched ranges of 630-680nm and 800-880nm? Power Density: How much irradiance/power does the device deliver—what is the power density in mW/cm2? (To calculate this, you need to know the total wattage and the treatment area of the light.) Size of the light and treatment area: This is critically important—how big of an area will it treat? Is it a small light of less than 12” or a big light that can treat half of your body or your whole body all at once? Think about it: Do you want to hold one of these small devices by hand for 30-60 minutes to do a treatment? Probably not. You’ll get tired of using it pretty quickly. So it has to be convenient, and ideally, has to be something that is not only fast, but something that you do while doing other things (if you wish), so you’re not sitting there holding a device in different positions for 30-60 minutes. Warranty: How long does the warranty last? Will you have time to find out if it works? (Hint: look for at least one year or longer.) What do you want it for? Depending on your specific purpose, there are a few different devices you may want to consider. (If you have specialty needs like brain health, or skin health, it will affect the wavelengths you want, the power of the device, and even the type of device.) I cannot emphasize enough: When choosing a red light or near-infrared light device, you want to be extremely careful to choose wisely, based on the wavelength and power density levels of the device. Wavelength and intensity makes all the difference between incredible benefits and no benefits.
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Ari Whitten (The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy: How to Use Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy for Anti-Aging, Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, Performance Enhancement, and Brain Optimization)
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And it wasn’t just Josh’s body. It was him. There wasn’t anything about him I didn’t like. I wished there were.
He was easygoing and funny. My moods didn’t scare him. He just kind of shrugged them off. He was down for anything. We hated all the same stuff—artsy indie movies with endings that didn’t have any closure, pineapple on pizza, daylight savings time. Sometimes he said something right as I was going to say it, like our brains worked on the same wavelength.
Every day I searched for some fatal flaw so I could stop having these feelings. Sometimes I purposely grilled him on things, just to see if his answers would irritate me.
It never worked.
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Abby Jimenez
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...hearing is at the heart of obedience. The '-edi-' in 'obedience' is from audire, from which we also get 'audio': obedience is about hearing with someone else (in hippie jargon, being tuned in to the same wavelength)....True obedience is not so much a bending of the will as it is a work of the intellect leading the will.
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Victor Lee Austin (Friendship: The Heart of Being Human)
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I have probably seen the death of Moore’s law predicted a dozen times,” Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, told me. “When we were working at three microns [one-thousandth of a millimeter: 0.001 millimeters, or about 0.000039 inches], people said, ‘How will we get below that—can we make film thickness thin enough to make such devices and could we reduce the wavelength of light to pattern such small features?’ But each time we found breakthroughs. It is never obvious beforehand and it is not always the answer that is first prescribed that provides the breakthrough. But every time we have broken through the next barrier.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.
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Anthony Esolen (Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child)