Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.