11 Heroic Sources Of Wisdom That Will Enlighten You To History’s Hidden Gems
And a little about the story behind the heroes.
Sometimes it gets old, hearing quotes from the usual suspects. US presidents, a limited cast of authors and thinkers, Einstein. It’s not that the quotes, or their authors, or those who quote them are bad — they are just becoming a little too familiar.
Here is a list of quotes you may not have heard before, from people who are lesser known gems of sourcing our wisdom from. I added some information about the person and some reflections.
This time, I took it to 11.
1. Srinivasa Ramanujan:
“An equation for me has no meaning, unless it expresses a thought of God.”
Ramanujan was a unique, intuitive mathematician. It seems almost taboo these days to talk about mathematics and God in the same sentence. This quote by him challenges us to consider that elegant math equations can be seen as innately divine. In a world governed by numbers, even the most stubborn atheist will struggle to make sense of the inherent beauty of mathematics. Ramanujan’s mind-blowing gifts with numbers hint at the infinite possibilities underlying our world.
2. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
“Do not undertake a scientific career in a quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them.”
One of the women from history many of us never learned about, Gaposchkin was an astronomer who discovered that the stars were made of Helium and Hydrogen. She was the first ever female professor at Harvard, and one of the great examples of a persistent glass ceiling in the modern era being shattered.
She’s a humble reminder to us that fame and fortune often do not equate to historical or objective greatness. Ultimately, those obsessed with making money are mainly business people. The unbiased and rigorous intellectual demands of science often are in conflict with the pursuit of monetary and public gains.
3. G.I. Gurdjieff
“Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words.”
A Russian philosopher and mystic, Gurdjieff has become famous in spiritual and esoteric circles for his insights into human nature and psychology. A deviser of powerful and radical ideas about personal growth, he never made it into the mainstream with the likes of Jung, Freud, or Perls. Nevertheless, he took paradigm-shifting steps in the esoteric tradition. He had a way of showing us who we are, and what we need to do to transform ourselves.
4. Max Frisch
“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
This lesser known yet accomplished German writer from the 20th Century had a way of reflecting on humanity in a stark and realistic way. Over time, who we are is gradually revealed, as it unravels through the story of our lives. Everything you see at any point in a person’s life was adumbrated in some original form early on.
5. D.H. Lawrence
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Maybe the most familiar person on the list to the mainstream, Lawrence is nevertheless a writer not often read. This quote becomes more gripping and true to me with every passing year as an American. It seems that our culture is perpetually obsessed with violence, individuality, and stone-cold grit. We can see it in our culture’s forms of entertainment and its crimes. Within our mundane selves, we often unconsciously seek to reform this social endemic.
6. William James Sidis
“I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is through seclusion.”
An isolated and underappreciated genius, Sidis was a prodigy and polymath of tremendous proportion. The best chance for the modern mainstream to have any familiarity with him is through the character Will in the movie Good Will Hunting, who was loosely inspired by Sidis.
His relatively unknown life and work, reclusiveness, and lack of recognition, are testament to the quintessential misunderstood savant. Among his achievements, were predicting the existence of antimatter and black holes —fourteen years before their first publication by Subrahmanyan Chandresakhar.
7. Dorothy Hodgkin
“Would it not be better if one could really ‘see’ whether molecules[…] were just as experiments suggested?”
One of the truly rare examples of a female winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, she was credited with discovering the structure of insulin. Whenever I find another influential woman from history I hadn’t known about, set against a disproportionately large number of men I’m familiar with, I realize that I’m seeing the disadvantages that have been imposed on women by a patriarchal society.
8. Mikhail Tal
“You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
A Russian Chess world champion from the 20th Century, Tal was renowned for his creativity as a player. He was famous for seeing chess as an artform above all else.
An attacking, aggressive, and endlessly imaginative player, he would change the world of Chess with his chaotic style of play. This was a different way of seeing the game, that took consistent risks, and emphasized trickery and improvisation over calculation, in dominating the board.
9. John Conway
“People think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit[…]it’s cats that are complicated.”
An American computer scientist, Conway was a pioneer in the field of programming. A master of the ultimate reductionist system that represents intricate systems in 0s and 1s, Conway’s quote makes us think of how what appears complex is simple, and what appears simple is complex.
Whereas we take a cat for granted in its identity, it is in some ways much harder to define in strict terms than a mathematical object. His quote could also be a subtle and mysterious nod to the eponymous cat of Schrödinger, which is used as a metaphor for paradoxes in quantum theory.
10. Hypatia of Alexandria
“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than to not think at all.”
Hypatia is the earliest person on the list. She would make progressive and critical thinkers of today’s world proud. Mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and matriarchal cultural leader. She was tragically murdered by an angry mob of Christians.
11. Clara Schumann
“I do not want horses or diamonds — I am happy in possessing you.”
Romantic composer Robert Schumann’s beloved, Clara was also the first truly serious concert pianist. If you have ever gone to see a piano concerto performed, you might have noticed that all of the musicians have sheet music in front of them while they play — everyone except the pianist.
We have Clara to thank for that. She is owed credit for bringing the piano to the forefront as a classical instrument to be performed in solo recital, with pianists still unrivaled on the instrumentalist ladder, for their task of memorizing all of their repertoire (even when playing with an ensemble).
Final Thoughts
The simple lesson here is that many great people in history go underrepresented. There’s a disproportionate way that the mainstream has of running its polls. It functions by some unconscious laziness and neglectfulness; the canonical list of quotable people and figures to become household names is kept relatively short and limited.
I’ve spent quite some time learning about thing after thing as tangents of learning about something else. Many of us are this way with how we explore our surroundings. This is one possibility that is specifically allowed by the internet. One question leads you to another and another — there’s no end to what you can investigate and uncover while trekking the seemingly infinite series of interconnected strands that forms the web. Like the universe itself, it is always expanding.