Dusa McDuff quotes

“Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!”
-- Dusa McDuff

#Talking Quotes #Ideas Quotes #Long Quotes

“These days people are much more aware that mathematics is a communal endeavor: even the most brilliant idea gets meaning only from its relation to the whole.”
-- Dusa McDuff

#Ideas Quotes #People Quotes #Brilliant Quotes

“If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”

“Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.”

“The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.”

Source : A. A. Gill (2008). “Paper view: the best of the Sunday Times television reviews”, Orion Pub Co

“Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.”

“I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.”

“Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.”

“Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.”

Source : "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". Interview with Susan Lerner, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.

“The man with but one idea in his head is sure to exaggerate that to top-heaviness, and thus he loses his equilibrium.”

“Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!” said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.”

“People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs.”

Source : A. C. Grayling (2004). “Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God”, p.130, Oxford University Press, USA