Quotations

Quotations

There is more information about the source of these quotes in the comments of the source file (URL:http://www.csmil.umich.edu/~lampert/quotes.html). Enjoy!

Research

Helen B. Schwartzman The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities p. vii
In writing this book I discovered that everyone I talked to had his or her own theory about meetings, and yet there is not theory of meetings in the research literature. This makes writing about the subject both exciting and hazardous. It is always exciting to examine the significance of something that has been ignored, but it is hazardous to write about something that everyone thinks they understand.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize Winner
Research is to see what everybody else has seen and think what nobody has thought.

Knowledge

Oscar Wilde Lady Windemere's Fan
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth -- one to speak and another to hear.

Humor and Truth

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Do you know of Boulding?"
"He isn't by any chance a character in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton or a citizen of an Emerging African Nation?"
"He's an economist, and he announced one of the great laws of modern times: if it exists, it must be possible."

Auden
Spotless rooms
where nothing's left lying about
chill me, so do cups used for ashtrays or smeared
with lipstick: the homes I warm to,
though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
of bills being promptly settled
with checks that don't bounce.

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Do you know what I like about you, Bill" ... "The fact that however much you stalk your prey, you do not class women with motor cars if they are attractive and with eye-flies if they are not." ... "I was quoting Forster."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"If a woman is not beautiful at twenty, it's not her fault; if she's not beautiful at forty, it is her fault. Have you ever thought of getting married?"
"Once or twice, lately. The ramifications of university upheavals are endless. Do you think marriage advisable? One has such lovely friendships with men whose wives were beautiful when they were twenty."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"I have believed ... that marriage for a woman spoils the two things that make life glorious: learning and friendship. Somehow, that no longer seems so unquestionably true."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Why do you dislike teaching undergraduates?" Hankster asked. "Or did you just say that to startle us?"

"I said it because it's true -- and tact isn't my most notable characteristic. Why is it true? Because of the age of undergraduates -- delightful, no doubt, but not for me. As far as I'm concerned, youth is a condition which will pass, and which I prefer to have pass outside of my immediate field of vision. Of course, I have nothing against young people -- apart from the fact that they are arrogant, spoiled, discourteous, incapable of compromise, and unaware of the price of everything they want to destroy. It's not that I disagree with their beliefs, or mind if I do disagree. I just prefer those whom life has had time to season.

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Don't misunderstand me, but you're the only woman I've ever known who seemed unmarried as a wonderful choice, the combined influence of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athene all in one. Please don't be offended."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
One may insult one's colleagues, the administration, or the Board of Governors, but one does not offend secretaries. "You," Kate said to Reed, "are my greatest accomplishment. I have achieved the apotheosis of womanhood. To have earned a Ph.D., taught reasonable well, written books, traveled, been a friend and lover -- these are mere evasions of my appointed role in life: to lead a man to the altar. You are my sacrifice to the goddess of middle-class morality, as Iphigenia was Agamemnon's sacrifice to Artemis."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them."

"As a matter of fact, I babble on, hitting the truth occasionally by happenstance which inspires students by the sheer surprise of it; the rest of the time they just feel comfortable superior. As to Auden, he's interested in squares and oblongs, rather than in sensory effects, which I like; that is, he understands that men always have moral dilemmas, which makes him intelligent, and he is able to present these structurally, which makes him an artist. The structures he uses are patterns of words, which makes him a poet. He's conceptual rather than descriptive, and he always sees objects, natural or not, as part of a relationship. He knows that, first and last, a poet has to express abstract ideas in concrete forms, his own words, as it happens. How's that for a one-minute lecture?"

"Brilliant."

"Thank you. I stole it from Richard Hoggart's introduction to Auden's poems,"

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"The trouble with discretion in a university, I've been learning, is that if a man is discreet, it turns out his friends are the only ones in the dark. Everyone else, of course, has been consulting like mad. The line between full consultation and decent discretion is finer than the razor's edge."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"In fact, it was one of Max's sentences Kate quoted to Reed when he asked her how her day had gone. "'To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine,'" she wearily said. "Likewise," said Reed. It was uncertain what a computer would have made of that.

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Our race would not have gotten far,
Had we not learned to bluff it out
And look more certain than we are
Of what our motion is about." -- Auden

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"Disruptions of communities, like illnesses, are not cured by being named; but if one names them, then one isolates them from their allies: unreasoning fear, anxiety, and trepidation. The magic of doctors, for all their research, Read pointed out to Kate, is still their power to name."

Amanda Cross Poetic Justice
"We cannot guess the outcome of our actions -- how often I have said that in discussions with students. Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies. Kant put it differently and better."

Ellis Peters Dead Man's Ransom
'Which of us,' said Owain sombrely [sic], 'has never been guilty of some unworthiness that sorts very ill with what our friends know of us? Even with what we know, or think we know, of ourselves! I would not rule out any man from being capable once in his life of a gross infamy.'

Sanity

Neil Fiore The NOW Habit
"Having a fear of impossible expectations means fearing that even after you've worked hard and achieved the goals set for you, your only reward will be continually higher and more difficult goals to achieve, with no rest and no time to savor your achievements."

Neil Fiore The NOW Habit
"Whatever happens I will survive. I will find a way to carry on. I will not let this be the end of the world for me. I will find a way to lessen the pain in my life and maximize the joy."
"In order to maximize your performance in a stressful world, you must create a protected and indisputable sense of worth for yourself. Until you do, energy and concentration will be drained from work and put into preparing for imagined threats to your survival, and into procrastination as a means of coping. Regardless of how you do it, or what you say, provide a safe place where you make yourself free of judgement, a place and a time where you can stop trying to perform.

Neil Fiore The NOW Habit
"I choose to start on one small imperfect step knowing I have plenty of time for play."

Bernie S. Siegel Love, Medicine & Miracles
"In the words of Rene' Dubos, 'Sometimes the more measurable drives out the most important.'"

Bernie S. Siegel Love, Medicine & Miracles
"I rather subscribe to Lawrence LeShan's outlook. Before he begins new research, he reads to see whether poets and artists have already expressed the same ideas. If they have, he proceeds, knowing he's on the right track."

Bernie S. Siegel Love, Medicine & Miracles
"The miracles come from within. You are not that unloved child anymore. You can be reborn, rejecting the old messages and their consequent diseases. When you choose to love you will have those days when you're not all you'd like to be, but you can learn to forgive yourself. You can't change your shortcomings until you accept yourself despite them. I emphasize this because many people, especially those at high risk of cancer, are prone to forgive others and crucify themselves. I see all of us as being perfectly imperfect, and ask that we accept ourselves that way. As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says, 'I'm not okay, you're not okay, but that's okay.'"

Bernie S. Siegel Love, Medicine & Miracles
"I tell all my patient to make their choices based on what would feel right if they knew they were going to die in a day, a week, or a year. That's one way of giving people an immediate awareness of how they feel, even if they have never paid any attention to feelings. We don't have the luxury of five years of psychoanalysis when someone may not live that long. We have to begin change immediately, and the best way is by asking what you'd want to do with this short period of time."

Last modified 26 June 1994.