On the threshold of any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise, the thousand ulterior intricacies and emperilings to which it... must conduct; these, at the outset, are mostly withheld from sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand... on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic. Surprise is what makes the difference. When you are organized t...o apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn't likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violate...s the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique, etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class. In this sense, medical men may speak correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when it belongs to a high class or to the best class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspira...tions. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on ...that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and ...though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset t...o fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I... came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »