Unfortunately, Google doesn't seem to be updating the Blogger platform. Apparently, the "Text" gadget is broken. I've tried hard to find a work around for this particular problem – without any luck, I'm afraid.
I'd intended to add several quotes to that section of this blog's sidebar, but it appears I won't be able to do so.
Rather than let the quotes languish outside the blog, I've decided to write a post listing them. This is that post.
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Bertrand Russell
No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know.
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
Every man I meet is in some way my superior; and in that I can learn of him.
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.
I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.
The teacher should not discourage his students from using trial and error – on the contrary, he should encourage the intelligent use of the fundamental method of successive approximations. Yet he should convincingly show that, for many situations, straightforward algebra is more efficient than successive approximations.
We wish to see the typical attitude of the scientist who uses mathematics to understand the world around us. In the solution of a problem there are typically three phases. The first phase is entirely or almost entirely a matter of physics; the third, a matter of mathematics; and the intermediate phase, a transition from physics to mathematics. The first phase is the formulation of the physical hypothesis or conjecture; the second, its translation into equations; the third, the solution of the equations. Each phase calls for a different kind of work and demands a different attitude.
In plausible reasoning the principal thing is to distinguish a more reasonable guess from a less reasonable guess. The efficient use of plausible reasoning is a practical skill … and it is learned by imitation and practice. What I can offer are only examples for imitation and opportunity for practice.
Even if without the Scott's proverbial thrift, the difficulty of solving differential equations is an incentive to using them parsimoniously.
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