Charles Percy Snow Quotes

My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire - perhaps illusory - to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.

I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

Suddenly a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way I had to take.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

I always liked those moments of epiphany, when you have the next destination.

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

This time next year,—this time ten years,—this time one hundred years,—probably it will be just as easy as we think it is to understand that glass of water, which now seems so plain and simple. I cannot doubt but that these things, which now seem to us so mysterious, will be no mysteries at all; that the scales will fall from our eyes; that we shall learn to look on things in a different way—when that which is now a difficulty will be the only commonsense and intelligible way of looking at the subject

Light itself is a revelation.

Once I started to look i finally began to see.

When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

Lists simplify, clarify, edify.

The moment you know you know you know.

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

You must find your treasure in order to make sense of everything you discovered on the path.

Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.