The Saunterer

Adam Smith on invention and complexity

    What Adam Smith says here had many examples in his time. But today, with inventions like airplanes, what he says is mostly false:

    The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced.

    (Quoted from page 211 of The Powers That Be: Global energy for the twenty-first century and beyond, by Scott L. Montgomery. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.)

    For a brief biography of Adam Smith, click here. For images of or relating to Adam Smith, click here.
    For a brief biography of Scott L. Montgomery, click here. For images of or relating to Scott L. Montgomery, click here.

Laurence Sterne on perseverance

    Laurence Sterne found great riches of satire in ordinary words, for instance: 

    Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,—and of obstinacy in a bad one.

    (Quoted from page 98 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. Vol. I. Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1760.)

    For a brief biography of Laurence Sterne, click here. For images of or relating to Laurence Sterne, click here.

Gilles Holst on the danger of over-organization in science

    The best research laboratories and universities, we think, go easy on organization, and it is nice to find the same idea mentioned by an esteemed scientist and professor, Gilles Holst:

    If organization is carried too far, it leads to a narrowing rather than a widening of our vision. Another serious disadvantage is that one cannot take into account the personal characteristics of the individual researchers, of whom especially the most original ones have difficulty adapting themselves to an organization.

    (Quoted from page 235 of Haphazard Reality, by Hendrik Casimir. Harper & Row, 1983.)
    For a brief biography of Gilles Holst, click here. For images of or relating to Gilles Holst, click here.
    For a brief biography of Hendrik Casimir, click here. For images of or relating to Hendrik Casimir, click here.

Henry Miller on how to be an artist of anything

    To be an artist, some would say dare to be yourself. Henry Miller says dare to be selfless:

    It was the monotony and sterility of the other outlets which drove me to desperation. I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience. Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. “No daring is fatal,” said René Crevel, a phrase which I shall never forget. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, i.e., in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support. In the beginning this daring is mistaken for will, but with time the will drops away and the automatic process takes its place, which again has to be broken or dropped and a new certitude established which has nothing to do with knowledge, skill, technique or faith. By daring one arrives at the mysterious X position of the artist, and it is this anchorage which no one can describe in words but yet subsists and exudes from every line that is written.

    (Quoted from page 185 of The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. A Mentor Book from New American Library, 1952.)
    For a brief biography of Henry Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Henry Miller, click here.
    For a brief biography of Brewster Ghiselin, click here. For images of or relating to Brewster Ghiselin, click here.

Linus Pauling on the wisdom of doing things yourself

    We’ve always done all aspects of our professional work, and Linus Pauling has the reason:

    My experience is that it is about as easy to do something myself as to get somebody else to do it, and if I do it myself I am satisfied with it, whereas if I get somebody else to do it I am not.

    (Quoted from page 221 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Linus Pauling, click here. For images of or relating to Linus Pauling, click here.

Will Eisner on how comic books combine the aesthetic and the intellectual

    This is what he says:

    The format of the comic book presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (e.g., perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regimens of literature (e.g., grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of the comic book is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit.

    (Quoted from page 8 of Comics and Sequential Art, by Will Eisner. Poorhouse Press, 1990.)
    For a brief biography of Will Eisner, click here. For images of or relating to Will Eisner, click here.

Wendell Berry on never taking a biography as the truth

    The next time you are thinking about buying a biography, pause to remember that biographers cannot really know their subjects. When asked “Who would you want to write your life story?,” Wendell Berry said:

    A horrible thought. Nobody. As the only person who ever has lived my life, I know that most of it can never be documented, is beyond writing and beyond words.

    (Quoted from page 7 of The New York Times Book Review, March 13, 2016.)
    For a brief biography of Wendell Berry, click here. For images of or relating to Wendell Berry, click here.

Bertrand Russell on periodically reexamining life

    Of all the advice given over the ages about how to live better, we believe the following, if people would do it once a year, would change the world:

    In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

    (Quoted from page 26 of Highway Builder, Volume 53. Associated Pennsylvania Contractors. 1974.)
    For a brief biography of Bertrand Russell, click here. For images of or relating to Bertrand Russell, click here.

Jacob Bronowski on how a culture is a multiplier of ideas

    Perhaps it takes someone like Jacob Bronowski with interests balanced in science and literature to see and say it like this:

    Every stage in the domestication of plant and animal life requires inventions, which begin as technical devices and from which flow scientific principles. The basic devices of the nimble-fingered mind lie about, unregarded, in any village anywhere in the world. Their cornucopia of small and subtle artifices is as ingenious, and in a deep sense as important in the ascent of man, as any apparatus of nuclear physics: the needle, the awl, the pot, the brazier, the spade, the nail and the screw, the bellows, the string, the knot, the loom, the harness, the hook, the button, the shoe—one could name a hundred and not stop for breath. The richness comes from the interplay of inventions; a culture is a multiplier of ideas, in which each new device quickens and enlarges the power of the rest.

    This holds equally for the culture of ideas in one’s mind; each new idea quickens and enlarges the power of the rest. So never lose an idea; it should gain power as new ideas come.

    (Quoted from page 59 of The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski. BBC Books, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Jacob Bronowski, click here. For images of or relating to Jacob Bronowski, click here.

G. H. Hardy on what makes a classic

    Where are fertile hunting grounds for classics? Obviously, literature. Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Mathematics, however, is far more fertile. For instance, G. H. Hardy called the proofs of two theorems classics—the standard proof that the square root of minus one is irrational, and Euclid’s proof that there exist infinitely many primes:

    They are “simple” theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant as when it was discovered—two thousand years have not written a wrinkle on either of them.

    I like classics because practically everything around me is temporary. A classic is to time as a compass is to space. Without classics we’d be lost.
    (G. H. Hardy as quoted from page 92 of his book A Mathematician’s Apology, Cambridge University Press, 1992; originally published 1940.)
    For a brief biography of G. H. Hardy, click here. For images of or relating to G. H. Hardy, click here.