Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.
A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies.
To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.
There is not a soul on Earth who can read the deluge of physics publications in its entirety. As a result, it is sad but true that physics has irretrievably fallen apart from a cohesive to a fragmented discipline. . . . It was not that long ago that people were complaining about two cultures. If we only had it that good. today.
One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.
One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot.
Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages. . . anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar. ' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.
I'm not mean, just aggressive.
What is beautiful for you may not be beautiful to someone else. Or whatever is beautiful here may not be beautiful there and what is sometimes beautiful today is not necessarily beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps this is the story of fashion and what makes it move forward, the fact that there is no decision whatsoever with what’s wrong.
Is your ego small enough, and your backbone strong enough, to raise others up high on your shoulders?
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.