Work - Quotes
Old age is not in itself matter for sorrow; it is matter for thanks, if we have left our work done behind us.
It's great when people appreciate your work, but I don't know how seriously to take it.
Marriage is the chance to put away the trappings of a single life and concentrate on making one good thing work really well.
Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, `I am going to produce a work of art`. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
Everything that happens around me shall work out for the good of all concerned.
Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn`t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it`s a lie. Books don`t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you`d believe.
Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results.
I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don`t work, you must throw them away. Don`t waste any neurons on what doesn`t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.
Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What`s left is magic. And it doesn`t work.
It`s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity`s highest callings.
The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.