Quotes

Memorable quotes mainly from books I have read.

Brexit

The undefined being negotiate by
the unprepared in order to get the
unspecified for the uninformed

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Matthew Syed

‘Later doesn’t always come to everybody.’

- Page 148

Excellence is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again. The paradox of excellence is that it is built upon the foundations of necessary failure.

- Page 168

"The best way to get a sense of the strange power of combinatorial explosion is to imagine folding a piece of paper in two, making the paper twice as thick. Now repeat the process a hundred times. How thick is the paper now? Most people tend to guess in the range of a few inches to a few yards. In fact the thickness would stretch eight hundred thousand billion times the distance from Earth to the sun.

- Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice" by Matthew Syed

A soldier is just a housewife, a guinea pig

- Chronicles By Bob Dylan Page 42

"Imagination is more important than knowledge, because knowledge is limited."

- Albert Einstein

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

\― Albert Einstein

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence"

- (Charles Bukowski)

"The further we are from the consequences of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them."

- The Great Mental Models

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

- Carl Sagan

"It is worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going"

- My Cousin Rachel by Daphne de Maurier

There's no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. Bowl of oatmeal, 30 miles - you can't come close to that.

- Bill Nye, science communicator

"Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it."

- Chinese proverb

Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.”

- Terry Pratchett.