“No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. That remark does not mean that scientists do not reject scientific theories, or that experience and experiment are not essential to the process in which they do so. But it does mean – what will ultimately be a central point – that the act of judgment that leads scientists to object a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. That decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“The German experience lies at the heart of the ‘modern experience.’ Germans often used to refer to themselves as the Herzvolk Europas, the people at the heart of Europe. Germans are also the Herzvolk of modern sense and sensibility.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“remember that neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or item by item. Except when all the conceptual and manipulative categories are prepared in advance – e.g., for the discovery of an additional transuranic element or for catching sight of a new house – both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience. The child who transfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females to his mother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs – indeed comma much of his perceived world – change accordingly.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude – a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know…”

G.K. Chesterton “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois” in The Wisdom of Father Brown https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown/chestertongk-wisdomoffatherbrown-00-h.html

“I may have some natural talent, but I don’t rely on it. That’s why I work 18 hours a day.”

Edward Greenspan quoted in Maclean’s Jan. 17, 2000

“The creation of a new creature, not ourselves, of a new conscious center, of a new and independent focus of experience and enjoyment, is an immeasurably more grand and godlike act even than a real love affair; how much more superior to a momentary physical satisfaction. If creating another self is not noble, why is pure self-indulgence nobler?”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Sept. 27, 1930, quoted in “Why Do You Keep Asking Me Rhetorical Questions?” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“If you spell ‘absolutely nothing’ backwards, you get gnihton yletulosba which means absolutely nothing.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution; it seems to be widely available online.

“he is a self-styled public-relations counselor – one of the various modern activities that are an insult to the dignity of man.”

Nero Wolfe to Inspector Cramer about Floyd Vance in Rex Stout The Father Hunt