Quotes for All
It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians … Read more
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. G. H. Hardy
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. G. H. Hardy
What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind. Ellen Glasgow
Astronomy is something like the ministry. No one should go into it without a call. I got that unmistakable call, and I know that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered. Edwin Powell Hubble
We’re worn into grooves by Time – by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we’ve been second-rate or champions, each in his way, in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that … Read more
I’ve often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life’s vast lampshade like fireflies or moths. Francoise Sagan
Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I never tried to emulate my father. Anyone trying to do that would be a second-rate carbon copy. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
The idea that Bill Gates (one of the founders of Microsoft) has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second rate technology, led them into it in the first place… Douglas Adams