Nothing Is More Sad Than The Death

A Writer's Ambition Should Be To Trade A Hundred Contemporary Readers For Ten Readers In Ten Years' Time And For One Reader In A Hundred Years' Time.

Wherever We Find Orderly, Stable Systems In Nature, We Find That They Are Hierarchically Structured, For The Simple Reason That Without Such Structuring Of Complex Systems Into Sub-assemblies, There Could Be No Order And Stability- Except The Order Of A Dead Universe Filled With A Uniformly Distributed Gas.

Death Tripped Down The Corridor, Changing Step, Struck Out Here And There, Danced Pirouettes; Often I Felt His Breath On My Face When He Was Miles Away; Often I Fell Asleep And Dreamed While He Stood Leaning Over My Bed.

Of All Forms Of Mental Activity, The Most Difficult To Induce Even In The Minds Of The Young, Who May Be Presumed Not To Have Lost Their Flexibility, Is The Art Of Handling The Same Bundle Of Data As Before, But Placing Them In A New System Of Relations With One Another By Giving Them A Different Framework, All Of Which Virtually Means Putting On A Different Kind Of Thinking-cap For The Moment. It Is Easy To Teach Anybody A New Fact...but It Needs Light From Heaven Above To Enable A Teacher To Break The Old Framework In Which The Student Is Accustomed To Seeing.

Innovation Is A Twofold Threat To Academic Mediocrities: It Endangers Their Oracular Authority, And It Evokes The Deeper Fear That Their Whole, Laboriously Constructed Intellectual Edifice Might Collapse.