Quotes for All
A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way trivial mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-important if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and serious expresses what … Read more
I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no … Read more
What is important, what isn’t important, and how do you clean yourself from all of the unimportant things. And then you can be content, and feel good with life, which is metaphorically speaking, walking on water. Eytan Fox
Chavez’s oil is unimportant for Bolivia… We are not dependent on Venezuela. We complement each other. Venezuela shares its wealth with other countries, but that doesn’t make us subordinate. Evo Morales
Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again. Ernst Mach
To be more successful, learn to distinguish between the truly unimportant and the truly important. Eventually you will be considered not only a genius, but a messiah as well. Ernie J Zelinski
The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing. The important, as well as the unimportant things, assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one’s full attention. Erich Fromm
There’s a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically — … Read more
The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer’s understanding of his subject and mastery of his process. Edward Weston
It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years. Edward R. Murrow