This post is a list of quotes regarding the goal of this blog. There are 17 quotes divided into 6 sections. The painting above is by Vincent van Gogh titled Wheat Field With Cypresses (1889).
A. Quotes are an effective way to communicate information (3)
B. I want to build a web of beliefs for various topics (3)
C. Clear language and simplicity is essential (4)
D. Consolidating information onto a single page is useful (2)
E. I want to create and update a dictionary of definitions (3)
F. Each post is a work in progress as my beliefs change (2)
A. Quotes are an effective way to communicate information
Marianne Moore:
1. "I've always felt that if a thing had been said the best way, how can you say it better?" (Paris Review Interview, 1960)
Marlene Dietrich:
2. "I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself." (Quoted in Presidential Wit and Wisdom by Brallier and Chabert)
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
3. "Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be open by dialing a certain word or number so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it." (Philosophical Occasions, 1993 posthumous)
B. I want to build a web of beliefs for various topics
Anatol Rapoport:
4. "A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concerned with the best available map of reality." (Science and the Goals of Man, 1950)
Rene Descartes:
5. "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." (Discourse on Method, 1637)
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
6. "The child learns to believe a host of things, i.e. it learns to act according to those beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system, some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it." (On Certainty, 1969 posthumous)
C. Clear language and simplicity is essential
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
7. "Are you a bad philosopher then if what you write is hard to understand? If you were better you would make what is difficult easy to understand but who says that's possible." (Quoted in Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life documentary)
John Searle:
8. "Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself." (Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 1993)
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
9. "If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained." (Culture and Value, 1980 posthumous)
Francis Bacon:
10. "Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." (Novum Organum, 1620)
D. Consolidating information onto a single page is useful
Francois de La Rochefoucauld:
11. "True eloquence consists in saying all that need be said and no more." (Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1665-1678)
Jonathan Ive:
12. "I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity. In clarity. In efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter." (Presentation at WWDC 2013 for iOS 7)
E. I want to create and update a dictionary of definitions
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
13. "People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in."(Philosophical Occasions, 1993 posthumous)
Socrates:
14. "The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms." (Goodreads.com)
Baruch Spinoza
15. "A definition, if it is to be called perfect, must explain the inmost essence of a thing, and must take care not to substitute for this any of its properties." (On the Improvement of Understanding, 1622)
F. Each post is a work in progress as my beliefs change
Walter Isaacson:
16. "As [Leonardo da Vinci] did with many of his paintings, he would hang on to the treatises that he was drafting, occasionally make a few new strokes and refinements, but never see them through to being released to the public as complete." (Leonardo da Vinci, 2017)
Vincent van Gogh:
17. "Quick work doesn't mean less serious work, it depends on one's self confidence and experience... I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast. Don't you believe a word of it. Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one's feeling for nature, that draws us, and if the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and coherence like words in a speech or letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will again be hard days, empty of inspiration. One must strike while the iron is hot and put the forged bars on the side." (Goodreads.com)
