“Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.”

The Wit and Wisdom of Alfredo Di Stéfano Kindle Location 98.

Preface to London music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto http://books.google.com/books?id=3PBP0ln1gLgC (1937) <br class="br">1940s and later

Solomon in All His Glory https://archive.org/details/solomoninallhisg00lynd (1922), pp. 12-13. <br class="br">Context: In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. One has to sit still like a mystic and wait. One soon learns that fussing, instead of achieving things, merely prevents things from happening. To be passive is in some circumstances the most efficient form of activity. You cannot command events: you can only put yourself in the place where events will happen to you. No impatient man has ever seen Nature.

Source: Discourse on Method

Interview for The Sun Magazine (2007)

Man a Machine (1747)

Age and Death
Afterthoughts (1931)

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094 (6 April 1929) <br class="br">Context: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything