“Don't try to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.”
Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher
Zire Notes (May 2004 - December 2006)
“To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
Letter to his brother Frank (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 136
Context: Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
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Robert Oppenheimer25
American theoretical physicist and professor of physics 1904–1967Related quotes
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