Quotes

In General

• "Heroes are like shadows. The closer you approach them, the smaller they become."
  -- Eric Herboso

• "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
  -- Albert Einstein

• "Someone told me a long time ago to beware of strange brooding men with cute fluffy dogs."
  -- Kino, from Kino's Journey

In Literature

• "In the end, they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are... I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - ... some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome... The spirit of man."
  -- Winston Smith, in George Orwell's 1984 (book)

In Math

In Science

• "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
  -- Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal In Bohemia, 1891

• "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
  -- Richard Feynman

In Politics

• "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."
  -- Karl Marx

• "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
  -- Plato

• "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
  -- Plato

In Philosophy

• "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
  -- Dr. Seuss

• "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
  -- Socrates

• "The best thing for being sad...is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn -- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics -- why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."
  -- Merlin, in T. H. White's The Once And Future King

In Religion

• "Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion."
  -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter XI

• "Agnosticism is not properly described as a 'negative' creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty .... That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions."
  -- Thomas Henry Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition: Collected Essays 5, 1894, London: Macmillan, 1902, 309-65, 310

In Love

• "Beauty before wealth, intelligence before beauty, and character before intelligence. To rank them any other way is to fail in your search."
  -- Eric Herboso

• "Acceptance is perfection; understanding is love."
  -- Ashley Saxon

In Magic

• "Love is to life as Morphling is to a control deck. You can do well without it, but why would you want to?"
  -- Eric Herboso

About Me!

Jokes

In Math

• "Consider ε<0..."
  -- Stefan Mohr

• "There was a young man named Kurt
  Who oft wore an interesting shirt
  Upon it was writ
  In calligraphic script
  'This sentence misspells one wurt.'"
  -- Mike Geller

• "There was a young fellow from Trinity
  Who took √∞. (square root of infinity)
  But the number of digits
  Gave him the fidgits;
  He dropped Maths and took up Divinity."
  -- George Gamow, One, Two, Three ... Infinity, 1988

In Science

• "There was a young lady named Bright
  Whose speed was far faster than light;
  She set out one day
  In a relative way
  And returned on the previous night."
  -- Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, Punch, 19 December, 1923

• "Said Einstein, 'I have an equation
  Which science might call Rabelaisian.
  If 'P' be virginity approaching infinity,
  Let 'U' be a constant persuasion.
  
  Now if 'P' over 'U' be inverted
  And the root of 'U' be inserted
  X times into 'P,' the result, QED
  Is a relative,' Einstein asserted."
  -- George Gamow, One, Two, Three ... Infinity, 1988

• "There was a young man named Fisk
  Whose fencing was so exceedingly brisk
  So swift was his action
  that the Firtzgerald Contraction
  Reduced his rapier to a disk."
  -- James Coleman, Relativity for the laymen, 1976

• The subatomic particle store had a sale last week.

Electrons: $0.10

Protons  : $0.10

Neutrons : free of charge

• Why did the cow fall off the roof?
  Because he lost his μ.

• A quark walks up to the bar, and seems too friendly with the bartender.
  The bartender asks: Are you a little queer?

• Q: Why does hamburger have lower energy than steak?
  A: Because it's in the ground state.

• One day you find yourself lost in mathland again...
  You see x walking around and make a talk about the weather. After a while, x^2 and e^x join you. The conversation moves to more small talk when suddenly 1 comes running by. "The differential operator is coming!" he screams. x and x^2 look around nervously and tell you that they have to split.
  "What's that all about?" you ask ex. "Oh, that's the diff. operator d/dx, when he gets close he has to act. For 1 it's especially nasty since he will completely vanish and also for x and x^2 it's quite irritating." he says. "To me it doesn't matter, however, since I will transform into my old self again.".
  And with a "poof" he suddenly vanishes. You here a soft noise behind you and you turn around. "Hi," says the diff. operator, "I'm d/dy."

• Two hydrogen atoms walk into an atoms-only bar.
  One says, "I've lost my electron."
  The other says, "Are you sure?"
  The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive..."

In Magic

• "Only 3 things can stop TRIX from winning. And they are BAD player, BAD construction, and BAD consult."
  -- Warren Malsh

• Sideboard interviewer: "What is the biggest mistake one can make while deckbuilding?"
  Kai Budde: "Hmm, that's a tough one. The most common by far is being American."

About Me!

• P: I've been reading your journal quite religiously.
  P: Intellectually speaking, it's the equivalent of masturbating to pornography...
  P: not as good as dis/intercourse, but enough to tide one over.
  -- P, one of my best friends