“As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
Source: Daja's Book
“As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
letter to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966); published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005), p. 198, 201
also quoted by Freeman Dyson in "Wise Man" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18350, The New York Review of Books (20 October 2005)
Context: The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
PENN Address (2004)
Context: The scale of the suffering and the scope of the commitment they often numb us into a kind of indifference. Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa is like wishing that gravity didn't make things so damn heavy. We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about it?
Well, more than we think. We can't fix every problem — corruption, natural calamities are part of the picture here — but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say, sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs in a crisis, we can do that. And because we can, we must. Because we can, we must. Amen.
“We can't change what we've done, but we can always change what we're going to do.”
Source: Time Untime
Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 4 (The Master Summoner)
She laughed again. “Children do love to believe such things.”
Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 24 (p. 343)