© Career advice - What’s new - By Terence Tao
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. (Erica Jong)
If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm. (Bruce Barton)
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence. (George Will)
A college degree is not a sign that one is a finished product but an indication a person is prepared for life. (Edward Malloy)
Chaque vérité que je trouvois étant une règle qui me servoit après à en trouver d’autres [Each truth that I discovered became a rule which then served to discover other truths]. (René Descartes, “Discours de la Méthode“)
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings. (Harold Geneen, “Managing”)
The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’, the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question, ‘Where shall we have lunch?’ (Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“)
行名失己, 非士也 [One who pursues fame at the risk of losing one’s self, is not a scholar]. (莊子 [Zhuangzi], “大宗師 [The Grandmaster]”)
The three pillars of learning; seeing much, suffering much, and studying much. (Welsh triad; later attributed to Benjamin Disraeli)
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on the novel”)
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work… (André Weil, “The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician”)
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. (Samuel Johnson, “Rasselas”)
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
(William Shakespeare, “The Taming of the Shrew“)
Worse than being blind, is to see and have no vision. (Helen Keller)
Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis? (Paul Halmos, “I want to be a mathematician”)
Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly. (Plutarch)
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table”)
The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. (Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”)
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. (Hector Berlioz)
We must get beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths… and tell the world the glories of our journey. (John Hope Franklin)
Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important and instructive phase of the work. … A good teacher should understand and impress on his students the view that no problem whatever is completely exhausted.
One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else. We have a natural opportunity to investigate the connections of a problem when looking back at its solution. (George Pólya, “How to Solve It“)
An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t. (Anatole France)
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. (Abraham Maslow, “Psychology of Science”)
A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration. (Kurt Lewin)
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. (Leon C. Megginson)
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent. (Isaac Newton)
Think like a wise man, but communicate in the language of the people. (William Butler Yeats)
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. (William Ward)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. (Niels Bohr)
It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. (Samuel Smiles)
It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing. (Quintilian)