Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

...there is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Now, I don't sweat the small stuff, just the things that really matter.

The second most important attribute of winners, after understanding the human dimension, is knowing what questions to ask, the rhetorical nature.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.

Goals help you keep in perspective what's really important so you don't spend all of your time doing what seems urgent.

Scale is very, very important, like the scale of a person is very important. It's to do with the size of our space, the fact they are big sculptures, they are still human scale.

The answers aren't important really... What's important is- knowing all the questions.

I don't worry about things that aren't important.

Someday you're going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

See what is worth learning, and what is worth doing. Thus, you gain an understanding of what is vital, and what is not vital. You need to learn what is important and what is not important. You need to understand what will move you upwards and onwards, and what will hinder you from traveling the higher path.

A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.

Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.

I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.

We hung out a lot together. We went and saw films together. It was really actually quite easy. I think we were all very subconsciously connected in knowing that we needed to make it important, and therefore it just became important and it worked. Everybody had a lot of respect for each other. I think respect is the most important thing you can have.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

We are not apt to think of the importance of events as they transpire with us, but we feel the importance of them afterwards.

The difference between living and half living is seeing well, looking for associations between things, seeking the connections, being aware of scale and proportion.

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

What we don't include is as important as what we do include.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.

To Islamize doesn't make sense to me. But to center, but to have intellectual empathy and modesty - all these dimensions are important on how we look at truth.