Johann Heinrich Lambert Quotes

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

There is no safety where there is no strength.

It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

Everybody has a theory.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Unity, to be real, must stand the severest strain without breaking.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

Flexibility is the key to stability.

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

Flexibility is a requirement for survival.

I'm not creating the universe. I'm creating a model of the universe, which may or may not be true.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'

That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slow, endures.

Freud was a hero. He descended to the "Underworld" and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

If you have stumbled or even been lost for a time, you can move forward with faith and not wander to and fro in the world any longer.

The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast, but never sinks.

I am not immortal, but I've got a lot left in me yet.

When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize each new opportunity. It doesn't approach an object with prejudice or preconception, but handles each thing dispassionately before embracing it and, if necessary, finds advantage in what opposes it. It is like fire in this regard. Whereas a feeble flame might suffocate under a pile of dry sticks, a robust fire consumes everything it touches. The more objects of any kind heaped on it, the higher it rises, the hotter it burns.

Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.

First we must understand that there can be no life without risk - and when our center is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.