Famous Quotes & Sayings

Umberto Eco

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.

Truman Capote

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to get dressed up for it.

Woody Allen

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.

Woody Allen

I have no idea what I am doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.

Woody Allen

Your self-esteem is a notch below Kafka.

Robyn Carr

Count on Jill Shalvis for a witty, steamy, unputdownable love story.

Virginia Woolf

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

Samuel Goldwyn

Keep a stiff upper chin.

Samuel Goldwyn

Let's bring it up to date with some snappy nineteenth century dialogue.

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

Woody Allen

Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

Roger Ascham

Marke all Mathematicall heades, which be onely and wholy bent to those sciences, how solitarie they be themselues, how vnfit to liue with others, & how vnapte to serue in the world.

Art Buchwald

The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo.

Douglas Adams

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

Albert Einstein

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

Ronald Fisher

If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.

Maurice Chevalier

Considering the alternative. . . it's not too bad at all.

John Ralston Saul

I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.

Michael Crichton

Theories are just fantasies. And they change.

Hippocrates

And he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.