Will and Mary in Ch. 33 : Marzipan
His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)
Context: "When you stopped believing in God, did you stop believing in good and evil?"
"No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.
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John Von Neumann 19
Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath 1903–1957Related quotes
“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him?”
Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
“The only two good things in life are doing mathematics and teaching it.”
La vie n'est bonne qu'à deux choses : à faire des mathématiques et à les professer.
quoted by François Arago in Notices biographiques, Volume 2 http://books.google.fr/books?pg=PA662&id=ZzNLAAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false, 1854, p. 662.
"The Greatest of the Monsters", p. 247
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
Zheng Yuanjie (2004) in: "Zheng Yuanjie's 19 years in fairy tales" on chinadaily.com.cn, May 10, 2004 ( online http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/10/content_329434.htm).
“How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?”
The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
“Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it.”
Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 7, p. 125
Context: Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22Life+is+simple%22+
Misattributed, Not Chinese