Delphi, Greece - 20071. "A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts."
2. “A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.”
3. “An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.”
4. “A person who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.”
5. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
6. “At times I think and at times I am.”
7. “A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death.”
8. “Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”
9. “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”
10. “History is the science of what never happens twice.”
11. “If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today , we sigh.”
12. “I set down the book; I look at my familiar things, I stroke my chin; I leaf through these notes. And all this passes without impediment, as if freely, as if these were separated and independent events, isolated in the void, and without interaction of the one upon the other. And the book lying there and the hand resting here have no interconnection; no more than the gleaming doorknob has with anything else around it.
But then I can suddenly see quite otherwise, and see with full volition, that all these things are cogs of a single engine, jigsaw pieces; and that each displacement is inescapably a substitution, as in a liquid in which one molecule cannot be moved without another taking its place. Now nothing is casual, nothing is alone. The independence of objects is now only an appearance. Their apartness, their noncontact, are appearances. And my illusion of liberty ...”
13. “It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.”
14. "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear or disappear with a simple move- ment of the hand, hardly more than a sign."
15. “Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.”
16. "Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh."
17. "Love is being stupid together."
18. "Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to."
19. “Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.”
20. “One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.”
21. “Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”
22. “Science is a collection of successful recipes.”
23. "Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science."
24. “Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”
25. “Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.”
26. “Sometimes I think, sometimes I am.”
27. "That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."
28. “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
29. “The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”
30. “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”
31. “The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.”
32. “The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.”
33. "Two dangers constantly threaten the Universe: order and disorder".
34. “We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves in the love with which we are loved eternally. He who is able to love himself is able to love others also; he who has learned to overcome self-contempt has overcome his contempt for others.”
35. “What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.”
