"An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

--

Source : Dr. John W. Gardner (2015). “Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?”, p.97, Pickle Partners Publishing

John Gardner

#Philosophy Quotes #Humble Quotes #Water Quotes

“I hadn't yet realised that learning to be a staff officer is something like learning to milk a cow. The novelty soon wears off, and the job becomes burdensome, and smelly. As a boy I learned the hard way that if you demonstrated skill at milking a cow, somebody would keep you milking one. It's the same way being a good staff officer.”
“I am endeavoring to steer gymnastics out of a dead end that satisfies only a handful of short-sighted individuals with nostalgia for an era gone by.”
“Software projects fail for one of two general reasons: the project team lacks the knowledge to conduct a software project successfully, or the project team lacks the resolve to conduct a project effectively.”

Source : Steve McConnell (1997). “Software Project Survival Guide”, p.7, Microsoft Press
“That's what acting is, it's exploring conflict.”

Source : "BYT Interviews: David Koechner". Interview with BYT, brightestyoungthings.com. September 22, 2016.
“This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”

Source : Steven Johnson (2006). “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”, p.146, Penguin
“I'm an actor, I worry about everything.”

Source : Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. March 4, 2009.
“It is necessary to recover the primeval force of the shock taking place at the moment when opposite a man (the viewer) there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier.”

Source : Tadeusz Kantor (1993). “A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990”, p.114, Univ of California Press
“If you try to fight the course, it will beat you.”

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