There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now. But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys. Dexter Palmer
About This Quote

John Steinbeck said that "there is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out." He also said, "and all you have is a spoon." This quote means that it is impossible to do something great with your life, because there are so many things that are important in life. So many people who have done things great with their lives did these things by starting small. They did it by doing something they enjoyed doing more than anything else through out their lives.

They did it by not being afraid of failure. Even though they are not able to do something great with their lives, they still find ways of enjoying themselves.

Source: Version Control

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it. - Nicholas Sparks

  2. Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile. - Nicholas Sparks

  3. Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to... - Lemony Snicket

  4. Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. - Albert Einstein

  5. Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. - Carl Sandburg

More Quotes By Dexter Palmer
  1. The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies

  2. But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible...

  3. Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know. What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly,...

  4. First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say that's essentially what regret...

  5. There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth...

Related Topics