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Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
--
War As I Knew It (1947) by George S. Patton, "Reflections and Suggestions"

 

George S. Patton

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We don't mean to mess things up,
But mess them up we do.
And then it's "Oh, I'm sorry."
Here's a smiling photograph
Of love when it was new.
At a birthday party.
Make a wish and close your eyes:
Surprise, surprise, surprise.

 

Paul Simon

 

People often lament that life is so impoverished, existence so powerless in all its magnificence, that it seeks in vain to take the soul by surprise or to captivate it in wonder, since to wonder at nothing is the highest wisdom, and to expect nothing is the highest truth. The child is astonished at insignificant things. The adult has laid aside childish things; he has seen the wondrous, but it amazes him no more; there is nothing new under the sun, and nothing marvelous in life. If, however, a person knew how to make himself truly what he truly is-nothing-knew how to set the seal of patience on what he had understood-ah, then his life, whether he is the greatest or the lowliest, would even today be a joyful surprise and be filled with blessed wonder and would be that throughout all his days, because there is truly only one eternal object of wonder-that is God-and only one possible hindrance to wonder-and that is a person when he himself wants to be something.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The fact that there simply is 5,000 times more sun power than our consumption needs makes me very optimistic. It's a fantastic resource. We have the ingenuity to send man to the moon, so we definitively have the ingenuity to tap the sun's resources.

 

Derek Abbot

 

The extraordinary surprise that my first pictures provoked is unlikely to be continued. Many people saw them fifteen years ago, ten years ago. Now children see it on their computers when the computers do nothing else. The surprise is not there. The shock of novelty is not there. Therefore the unity that the shock of novelty, surprise, provided to all these activities will not continue. People will know about fractals earlier and earlier, more and more progressively. I think that the best future to expect and perhaps also the best future to hope for, is that fractal ideas will remain either as a peripheral or as a central tool in very many fields.

 

Benoit Mandelbrot

 

Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.

 

Edgar Allan Poe