Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end upfinding their efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?) separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.
Paul SamuelsonRelated topics
advice break calling chosen darwinian doubt end few ground harm hearing less likely process profound separate testing time trivial naysayer yea-sayerRelated quotes
When a man paints a naked woman he gives her less than poor Nature did. I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money. She is the most beautiful thing there is - except a naked man, but I never saw a study of one exhibited.
Thomas Eakins
How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone.
Paul Nurse
No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.
Charlotte Brontë
However often we turn to it the Koran at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence.... Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.
Edgar Allan Poe
