Rejoinder when told that he couldn't talk about physics, because "nobody [at this table] knows anything about it."
Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake", p. 310.
Quoted in Handbook of Economic Growth (2005) by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
Source: Pensées
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Blaise Pascal 144
French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Chri… 1623–1662Related quotes
“We only talk of what we know, so as to know of little is to talk of little”
Book: Cometan, the Omnidoxy
This song, Somewhere Only We Know, originated with the group Keane, in 2004, although Allen did a very popular version of it, on a YouTube video in 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mer6X7nOY_o.
Misattributed
“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”
“The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterwards.”
Source: The Cave (2000), p. 22 (Vintage 2003)
“We don't have to know,
only to be:
let go the jumble of worn words,
reason and vanity.”
Star by Day.
“The only thing of which we can be sure—time passes—everything else is vanity.”
Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 33 (p. 475)
“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”