“To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.”
6 February 1752
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“MS Dhoni still the best bet as Test and ODI captain. No calmer finisher than Dhoni.”
Harsha Bhogle https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/dhoni-quotes/
As quoted in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009), p. 64
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 87
Science is a very adversarial activity! Hence the old adage among physicists: Physics is a contact sport.
Chapter 2 "The Nature of Science" (p. 43)
What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009)
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
Preface
Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
Context: I believe this thought, of the possibility of death — if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life — that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' — but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man — and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
