"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us
prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we
may not eff it after all."
Douglas Adams
"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till
you come to the end: then stop."
Lewis Carroll
"Oh, it needn't come to that!" Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him
from beginning.
Lewis Carroll
What you can do or dream you can, begin it!
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage and the mind grows heated.
Begin it and the work will be completed!
Goethe
When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then we must rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices, or at last desist
To build at all?
Shakespeare (HENRY IV, Part 2 iii.[41])
Are we not threatened with a flood of information? And is this not the
monstrousness of it, that it crushes beauty by means of beauty, and annihilates
truth by means of truth? For the sound of a million Shakespeares would produce
the very same furious din and hubbub as the sound of a herd of prairie buffalo
or sea billows. Such vastly multiplied content in collision brings no credit to
thought, but rather its destruction. When faced with such a fate, is not
Silence alone the redeeming Ark of the Covenant between the Creator and the
Reader, since the Creator gains merit by refraining from spinning out just any
old content, and the Reader gains it by praising such manifest self-denial?
Stanislaw Lem
Action is the proper fruit of knowledge.
Thomas Fuller
The older we become, the more important it is to use what we already know
rather than to learn more.
I.J. Good
The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it `nonsense' if you
like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which
that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"
Lewis Carroll
"Luckily," he went on, "you have come to exactly the right
place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word
as 'impossible' in my dictionary. In fact," he added, brandishing
the abused book, "everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade'
seems to be missing."
Dirk Gently (Douglas Adams)
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes (A. Conan Doyle)
"The impossible often has an integrity to it which the merely
improbable lacks."
Dirk Gently (Douglas Adams)
(IMPOSSIBLE Means:
Completeness is a red-herring.
Morten Irgens
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's
logic."
Lewis Carroll
"If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a lot of
trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any."
Lewis Carroll
...the credence that we place in a conjecture is bound to depend on
our whole background, on the whole scientific atmosphere
of our time.
George Polya
"It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it
is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no
discovery, because it knows already. Why must it demonstrate that
which could not be otherwise?"
Umberto Eco
In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only
chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.
Ursula K. LeGuinn
Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.
Stanislaw Lem
"No, no! The adventures first," said the Gryphon in an impatient
tone: "explanations take such dreadful time."
Lewis Carroll
But whereas machines must be able to execute programs (without understanding
them), people must be able to understand them (without executing them).
Dijkstra
Computer science is no more about computers
than astronomy is about telescopes.
Dijkstra
Despite ever-increasing speeds of computers, subtelty and careful use
of resources will characterize intelligent systems.
Russell & Norvig, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,"
1995
Finally, beware computer power!... in that,
as this power increases,
so does the scope for the dangerous shift in emphasis from the
question `is the model sensible?' to `will it compute?' The danger
of making this shift unthinkingly is to mistake a necessary
condition for a sufficient one and wrongly to identify the
complexity of a model with its worth.
Dr. Frank Critchley (University of Warwick)
"Let us likewise beware of believing the universe is a machine; it is
certainly not constructed so as to perform some operation, we do it far too
great honour with the word `machine'."
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, from the introduction to "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra", p17. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1969,
New York, NY.
I feel it is a strategic error to first build a machine and then
ask what it can do.
Peter Cheeseman
Time is nature's way of seeing that everything doesn't happen at once.
Chet Atkins
One day you will die, and everything you accomplished
will fall to ruin. Try not to take it personally.
Bradley Cotterall
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," said Alice.
"It gets easier further on," Humpty Dumpty replied.
Lewis Carroll
The way to capture a student's attention is with a demonstration
where there is a possibility the teacher may die.
Jearl Walker
If an expert does not have some problem to vex him, he is unhappy!
If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, he pines away.
Chuang Tzu
Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of
the flesh.
Ecclesiastes 12:12b