My Small Boat

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Four people are in a room and seven people leave it. How many must go in before the room is empty?

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in one who eats grape-nuts on principle.

Angel’s Song
I know not, I,
What the men together say,
How lovers, lovers die
And youth passes away.
Cannot understand
Love that mortal bears
To native, native land,
All lands are theirs;
What at grave they grieve
For one voice and face
And not, and not receive
Another in its place.
I above the cone
Of the circling night
Flying, never have known
Less or greater light.
Sorrow it is they […]

May every young scientist remember… and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much nearer the truth.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, “Pray which leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch,
Considering how to run.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.