Theory therapy?

With both Jerry and I enrolled in theory-intensive coursework, there's been plenty of abstract conversation around the dinner table these days. I've recently diagnosed myself with "theory fatigue." However, I have been enjoying it for the most part and have even stumbled across some inspiration along the way.

After limping through several hundred pages of Weber's Economy and Society, I decided to pick up one of the suggested readings, Science as a Vocation, just for fun and had some good laughs. Who knew reading Max Weber could be therapeutic? Here are a couple of highlights:

"And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science."

"Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider...you have no calling for science and you should do something else."

"Ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us. The best ideas do indeed occur to one's mind as Ihering describes is: when smoking a cigar on the sofa; or as Helmholtz states of himself with scientific exactitude: when taking a walk on a slowly ascending street; or in a similar way. In any case, ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding or searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion."

"In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years...Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact."