To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

--- common paraphrase of Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching Chapter 48

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.

--- Russ Rymer, cited by Fauconnier and Turner, Ch. 17, The Way We Think (2002); according to wikipedia, published in Annals of Science in "The New Yorker", 13th April 1992

[It] seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature are more like the temperature of the Earth - properties of our local environment that vary from place to place.

--- Leonard Susskind, physicist

Source: Because we're here, Interview with Leonard Susskind, New Scientist 17 Dec 2005. Quote in context:

Q. Steven Weinberg recently said that this is one of the great sea changes in fundamental science since Einstein, that it changes the nature of science itself. Is it such a radical change?

A. In a way it is very radical but in another way it isn't. The great ambition of physicists like myself was to explain why the laws of nature are just what they are. Why is the proton just about 1800 times heavier than the electron? Why do neutrinos exist? The great hope was that some deep mathematical principle would determine all the constants of nature, like Newton's constant. But it seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature are more like the temperature of the Earth - properties of our local environment that vary from place to place. Like the temperature, many of the constants have to be just so if intelligent life is to exist. So we live where life is possible.

For some physicists this idea is an incredible disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. I find it exciting to think that the universe may be much bigger, richer and full of variety than we ever expected. And it doesn't seem so incredibly philosophically radical to think that some things may be environmental.

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones

--- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century French writer and moralist

From Inside Influence Jan 2006, which discusses which faults to confess.

Quantum theory isn't a description of physical reality. All it does is provide correct answers to meaningful questions about experiments.

--- The late physicist Asher Peres

cited by Mark Buchanan in "Discovering the true nature of reality", New Scientist, 18 Jun 2005, p 34

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the Writer's Almanac, 5 January 2006