Quotations:
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai
pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. ("I made this [letter]
longer because I didn't have the time to make it shorter.")
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) - French Mathematician
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines ...
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what
tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts
everything you said today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First
Series, 1841
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious
triumphs,
even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with
those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much,
because they live in the gray twilight that knows not
victory nor defeat.
"I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the
sentiment of others, and all positive assertions of my own. I
even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the
language that imparted a fixed opinion, such as 'certainly', or
'undoubtedly' and adopted instead of them, 'I conceive', 'I
apprehend', or 'I imagine' a thing to be so or so or 'it so
appears to me at present'. When another asserted something that
I thought in error, I'd deny myself the pleasure of
contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some
absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by
observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion
would be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed
to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this
change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went more
pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions
procured them a readier reception and less contradictions; I had
less mortifications when I was found to be in the wrong and I
more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and
join with me when I happened to be in the right. And this mode,
which I first put on with some violence to natural inclinations,
became at length so easy and habitual to me, that perhaps for
these 50 years past no one has heard a dogmatic expression
escape me. And to this habit (after my character of integrity) I
think it principally owing that I had earned so much weight with
my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
alterations in the old; for I was a bad speaker, never eloquent,
subject to hesitation in my choice o words, hardly correct in
language, and yet generally carried my points."
-Benjamin Franklin
, often quoted as saying "The only constant is change." ...
You do not step into the same river twice.
Heraclitus, c. 500 BC
