Quotes
Authors
Steven Johnson

"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

Steven Johnson

#Practice Quotes #Water Quotes #Intellectual Quotes

“Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.”
“One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.”

Source : T. E. Hulme, Patrick McGuinness (2003). “Selected Writings”, p.77, Psychology Press
“You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice -- over the weeks and months and years to come -- requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn't a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.”

Source : Brian Morton (2007). “Starting Out in the Evening”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
“You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.”
“It's such a biblical posture in worship that speaks of reverence. If you look through the Bible, there's a whole host of people who faced up to the glory of God and found themselves facedown in worship. So the album weaves through a theme of reverence, wonder, and mystery in worship, things I feel we really need to grasp more of in our worship expressions. I know that I do!”
“He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.”
“Infants are interesting only to their parents.”

Source : Marya Mannes (1971). “Out of my time”
“Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless.”

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