New answers tagged quote-source
15
I found a French version of the quote on histoire-genealogie.com, where it was attributed to Plato:
« Il y a trois sortes d’hommes : les vivants, les morts, et ceux qui vont en mer » (Platon : Critias, L’Atlantide)
However, I could not find anything similar in a French translation of Critias, nor in a French translation of Timaeus (Plato's other dialogue ...
5
I too have not found that line in Aristotle's works. It is often stated to be the work of Anacharsis, whose works did not survive to the current era, but was much quoted, including by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. The earliest reference I've found so far is from the 1702 The Lives of Ancient Philosophers:
He doubted whether People at Sea were to be ...
5
The quote comes from Franz Alt’s recollection of a talk given by von Neumann at the very first meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947:
Several versions of background wiring and their corresponding source languages were under discussion, each having a vocabulary between 50 and 100 instruction types. Their implementation and testing began ...
1
Math is considered by many people to be hopelessly complex.
Hence, people "do not believe" math is simple, as von Neumann states in your quote. He implies that people do not appreciate the simplicity of mathematics. The only reason people make the mistake of considering math to be 'complicated' is because they consistently underestimate the ...
1
The crux of this quotation basically hinges on two premises: that mathematics is simple, and that life is complicated.
Next thing to know here is that Neumann sorta tries to establish a Cause-Effect relationship between the complexity of life and the simplicity of mathematics.
He basically says that people fail to see and appreciate the complexity of life, ...
3
The idea (usually presented as paradoxical or ironic) that atheism might consist of disbelief in a particular god, rather than gods in general, has a long history, as you’ll see from the quotations below. None of these have the exact wording you are looking for, but once familiar with the idea it would not be difficult for someone to put it into the form ...
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This was investigated in 2016 by Garson O’Toole (aka ‘Quote Investigator’) who traced the quotation back to a 1970 sermon by Ernest Campbell:
It has been said that the two most important days of a man’s life are the day on which he was born and the day on which he discovers why he was born. This is why we were born: To love the Lord our God with all our ...
4
This was investigated in 2013 by Garson O’Toole (aka ‘Quote Investigator’), who traced the joke back to a 1958 column by Sid Ziff, then sports editor of the Los Angeles Mirror News:
[Bill] Miller, who contributes now and again to Inside Track, once wrote a book titled “To You I Tell It.” It received mixed reviews. One critic said: “It is not a book to be ...
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