I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist an...d has been influenced by the methodical path of the Jesuits.... It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that all can reach salvation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae; he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true; he finds fact... nowhere and approximation always.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria..., with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams. Unlike a truly paludismic ordeal, however, the symptoms felt while savoring a collection of one man's pet quotations are voluptuously enjoyable ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an eve...nt happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheles...s, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat- flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, ...and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, and yet recurring inevitably, wit...hout a finale in nothingness--"eternal recurrence."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes..., their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »