Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.
If you overdo something, you end up typecast. You always have to expand.
Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones
It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.
Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.
Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.
Something happened to me and I became really successful at something at a young age, and that stunts you in every other aspect of your life because you feel like that's what you're good at and so that's what you need to stay in.
I made the mistake of pouring my entire identity into one single dream and convincing myself that I was not capable of anything else or creating any other dream.
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Athletes today get into a single-minded, one sport routine. I can't stand it.
So there's no such thing as one too many this, one too many that. I remember, you're reminding me of early in my career, somebody said to me: why are you taking so many roles as a policeman.
It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number.
