If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledge are those knowledge that idiots possess.
There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
Nobody must judge me based on my decisions, and only my knowledge and education must be the criteria to judge me.
Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them.
To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor, it's the work that matters.
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man's duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside, and the view only taken cognizance of. This will be the millennium of Science.
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.
But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list.
