🚀 go-pugleaf

I'll confess my secret vice. I'm a tidbit and quote collector. While
going through some old files of class handouts I encountered a few to
share with you. Some relate to things we've discussed recently.

In the fields of observation chance favors only the mind that is prepared.

        - Louis Pasteur (1822-95) French chemist.

Science is not formal logic - it needs the free play of the mind in as
great a degree as any other creative art. It is true that this is a gift
which can hardly be taught, but its growth can be encouraged in those who
already posses it.

        - Max Born (1882-1970) German physicist.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within
himself.

        - Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian physicist and astronomer.

The scientist is a practical man and his are practical (i.e., practically
attainable) aims. He does not seek the _ultimate_ but the _proximate_. He
does not speak of the last analysis but rather of the next approximation.
His are not those beautiful structures so delicately designed that a
single flaw may cause the collapse of the whole. The scientist builds
slowly and with a gross but solid kind of masonry. If dissatisfied with
any of his work, even if it be near the very foundations, he can replace
that part without damage to the remainder. On the whole he is satisfied
with his work, for while science may never be wholly right it certainly
is never wholly wrong; and it seems to be improving from decade to decade.

        - Gilbert N. Lewis (1875-1946) US chemist. Quoted in _Stochiometry_
        by Leonard K. Nash, Addison-Wesley, 1966, p. vii.

Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along
without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use
of his intelligence.

        - Albert Edward Wiggam

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make
yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether
you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and
however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson
that he learns thoroughly.

        - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) English biologist and writer.

He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know.

        - George Simmel (1858-1918) Sociologist, philosopher.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing
new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.

        - Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss psychologist.

Nobody knows why, but the only theories which work are the mathematical ones.

        - Michael Holt, in _Mathematics in Art_

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of
all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

        - Ernst Mach (1828-1916) Austrian physicist.

I've got lots more in scattered files. If I get a few private e-mail
encouragements, I might reformat them ASCII and post them here. The ones
on education, schools, and teachers are especially good.

        - Donald