Jonah Lehrer, on causality

"A cause is not a fact. It’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts"

John Jeremiah Sullivan, on Jesus Christ

"His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness"

Henry Ford, on innovation

"Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas"

Malcolm Gladwell, on theory

"People are information-rich and theory-poor. If you can give them a way of organizing their experience, then their minds are wide open"

Leon Wieseltier, on browsing

"When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for"

Kenan Malik, on belief

"No one comes to believe in God because they have been convinced by the arguments for God’s existence"

Helmuth von Moltke, the Elder, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff

"No plan survives the first two minutes of battle."

Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon movie

Fear... is the price of our instrument(imagination).

Claude Lévi-Strauss, French Anthropologist

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Donald Knuth

The journey is more important than the destination—that’s part of life.

If you only live for getting to the end, you’re almost always disappointed.

Alfred North Whitehead

God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Donald Knuth, Coders at Work book

I think it’s probably more that I’ll try harder things. I always try

things that are at my limit. If I had to go back and write those kinds of

programs again, the easier ones, I wouldn’t make so many mistakes. But

now that I know some more, I’m trying to write harder stuff. So I make

mistakes because I’m always operating at my limit. If I only stay in

comfortable territory all the time, that’s not so much fun.

James Cameron, film director

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success."