Quotes for today

1. If today, you are not confused, you just not thinking clearly. --Irene Peter

2. She who seeks her knight in shining armor must remember that she will have to clean up after his horse. --Anon.

3. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globes of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carosel, my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light...for far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!

Why do poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, man must be silent? --Richard Feynman

4. I know that I saw my own Hell there, the Hell of the artist, and that all who sought after beautiful and wonderful things with too avid a thirts lsto peace and form and became shapeless and common. --W.B. Yeats

5. Someday, when we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tide, and gravity, we will harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. --Rene de Chardin


1. What? I don't even get this quote - perhaps it may be in accurate in specific instances, but in general, it is too unnuanced to be useful.

2. Ah yes, sophomore year, when I was cynical about love.

3. Richard Feynman. Like Cicero, one of the crown princes of "I'm so special" and, like Cicero, might have th resume to back it up. Nobel prize winner in physics, and he's a gifted writer. He wrote a few books that are funny and piquant and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. He's also a thorough-going jerk, to judge from his writings. But he's not wrong about poetry. :) Why isn't there more poetry about science? I don't even know - is it the lack of overlap in skill sets, or is it a fundamental disconnect between the two disciplines? A too-wide disparity in what characteristics are rewarded? I think it is that. Tom Lehrer is a a beautiful abberation.

4. I honestly don't know what Yeats was getting at here - don't try so hard, don't want it so much? Am I not enough of an artist to understand, or was he having a moment all of his own?

5. Love this quote. Impossible physics-ly, but beautiful.