Words

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning," Mark Twain, 1888

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for," Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

"...wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words," Dorothy Parker, interview in Paris Review, 1956

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink," George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

 

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place," William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 1959

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs." – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000

“A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous," Ingrid Bergman

Writing

 There are only two types of stories: the ones where the characters begin unhappy and end happy, which are the ones that sell, and the ones where the characters begin happy and end unhappy, which are the ones English majors read. (attribution unknown)

"I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit," Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft 

Stephen King's web site

Happiness

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened," Dr. Seuss

Invention

“Invention is about formulating the right question to ask,” Steve Perlman

“Invention makes the impossible possible,” Steve Perlman

Science

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".


To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.


Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.”

― Paul Davies

Check out Mr. Davies site

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.” 

William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering The Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design