 Avoid people with no sense of humour. They have bad heads, bad hearts, or both. To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. The intellectual content of an activity is inversely proportional to the number of people watching it. It is never too late to be what you might have been. If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I've been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips, climb more mountains, and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones. Make everything as simple as possible... but no simpler. The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.
Have you ever thought... about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his calculations and computations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland", but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? There are only three things in life that matter: binding up the wounds, to avoid wounding, and to improve the view from the window. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare. Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. No one who has once taken the language under his care can ever again be really happy. We dance round in a ring and suppose, It is spring; "Science" is hard to define, but if the word appears in the name, it probably isn't. Science deals in disprovable assertions. If something can not, in theory at least, be disproved by experiment and/or observation, then it is not in the domain of science. Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves. To make God laugh, tell him your plans. Down the Yangtze the awful prediction has been fulfilled. You expect this river trip to be an experience of the past — and it is. But it is also a glimpse of the future. In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and old-fangled: no trees, no birds, and shortages of fuel and metal and meat; but plenty of pushcarts, cobblestones, ditch-diggers, and wooden inventions. Nine hundred million farmers splashing through puddles and the rest of the population growing weak and blind working the crashing looms in black factories. God doesn't know the difference between physics and chemistry. On The Dunes Eppur si muove. [translation: It moves all the same.] I am too skeptical to believe in the impossibility of anything. They copied all they could follow, Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable, not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of transition. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place. Everybody needs money; that's why they call it "money". The Interpreter Computers are useless. They only give answers. Entropy requires no maintenance. I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I — nor would I want to — conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. As Canadian as possible under the circumstances. |
