Joseph Jastrow quotes

Inventions become perfect by slow improvement, and each step is itself an invention.
-- Joseph Jastrow

#Perfect #Steps #Improvement

In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
-- Joseph Jastrow

#Progress #Routine #Tradition

The world is as large as the range of one's interests. A narrow-minded man has a narrow outlook. The walls of his world shut out the broader horizon of affairs. Prejudice can maintain walls that no invention can remove.
-- Joseph Jastrow

#Wall #Men #Prejudice

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . .. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

When I kicked in the first TV – a nineteen-inch Magnavox with wicker speaker panels – it felt like the most perfect thing I had done in a long time. And there's nothing like the feeling of perfection that will inspire repeated behavior.

There are people who balk at small civilities on account of their manifest insincerity. ... It is better and more logical to accept all the polite phraseology which facilitates intercourse, and contributes to the sweetness of life. If we discarded the formal falsehoods which are the currency of conversation, we should not be one step nearer the vital things of truth.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling'.

If I had my way, I'd do all my entertaining on the front steps

Vanity prevents improvement

The things which hurt, instruct.

Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm, but it's going to be a gradual improvement.