Life Quotes that Ressonate in Me
When his friend Besso died, Einstein wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s family:
“Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
The following quote is by Alex Wright, a mathematician from University of Michigan. He was referring to the working style of the great mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani:
“Good mathematicians have the courage to imagine that they can solve a problem, and to imagine an answer. Having the insight or faith that the solution can be figured out is really very important. Certainly, I think her personality was ideally suited to thinking about problems for a really long time and persevering on them.”
A quote by Franz Kafka:
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
In an interview with the Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Jordan Petterson he says:
"You should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful, but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable. It's the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any permanent security outside of your ability to contend...
You're paying a price by sitting there being miserable, and you might say, well, the devil I know is better than the one I don't. Don't be so sure of that. The clock is ticking and if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years, you'll be much more miserable, and you'll be a lot older.
I'm not talking about what makes you “happy”. It's a luxury to pursue what makes you “happy”. It's a moral obligation [not a luxury] to pursue what you find meaningful. And that doesn't mean it's easy… it might require sacrifice... You have responsibilities... [but thinking], well I don't like my job, I quit. That's no strategy. But [that is] what you might have to do if you think this job is killing my soul. All right. So what do I have to do about that? Well, maybe you need to educate yourself more. Maybe you need to update your CV. Maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed. Maybe you need to sharpen your social skills. You have to think about these things strategically if you're going to switch careers. You have to do it like an intelligent, responsible person and that might take you a couple of years of effort to do properly."
Now, a quote from “Confession of a physicist” written by Basab Dasgupta:
Physicists learn to become proper, logical, precise and consistent in their conversations and behavior. The worst of all is the fact that physics education takes them away from God presumably because existence of God cannot be proved from laws of physics.
They do not realise that physics in particular and science in general, is a closed self-serving prophecy in the sense that it claims human intelligence can explain everything including the origin of intelligence. As a result, physicists never learn things that can be learned by means other than intelligence – by faith, intuition and experience.”