Quotes by Scientists - Page 11

Definitions create conditions.
Alfred Korzybski
Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.
David Brin
The species greatest harvest ― words.
David Brin
I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity.[Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]
Joseph Henry
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.
Alastair Reynolds
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.
Michael Faraday
I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood.
Mark Lawrence
Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying— lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies— which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!
Mark Lawrence
I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.
Michael Faraday
Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting over lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Roy Amara
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
J.D. Bernal
Sometimes ones man's creativity is another machine's brute force analysis
Andrew McAfee
A novelist must believe he can outdo himself. Or his creative drive would die.
Johan Fundin
Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.
Mark Lawrence
After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant's yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.
Hope Jahren
What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Living isa thing you donow or never --which do you?
Piet Hein
Life must be lived at the right time. Death is not scary when one dies after having lived fully. One must choose to live though and face all adversities.
Massimo Marino
When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease which in the absence of excitement he could scarcely move; he who under the rage of an insult attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies,—are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is human nature to strive.
Temple Grandin
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Your neighbors are not all sheep. Your political opponents are not all evil or fools. Try talking to those you despise. They are your fellow citizens. And together, we are not lesser than any "greatest generation.".
David Brin
Eating is not a crime. It’s not a moral issue. It’s normal. It’s enjoyable. It just is.
Carrie Arnold
I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.
Temple Grandin
Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
Edwin H. Land
Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life ... I do not accept your definition of faith i.e. belief in life after death ... Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish ... [as to] the question of a creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe.
Rosalind Franklin
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.
Mark Lawrence
Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.
Apj Abdulkalam
And while throughout the self same motion Repeated on forever flows The thousandfold o er arching ocean Its strong embrace around all throws Streams through all things the joy of living The least star thrilleth fond accord And all their crowding all their striving Is endless rest in God the Lord. - - -GER:Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbeSich wiederholend ewig fließt,Das tausendfältige GewölbeSich kräftig ineinander schließt,Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen,Dem kleinsten wie dem größten SternUnd alles Drängen, alles RingenIst ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn.Zahme Xenien VI.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing will ever equal that moment of joyous excitement which filled my whole being when I felt myself flying away from the earth. It was not mere pleasure; it was perfect bliss. Escaped from the frightful torments of persecution and of calumny, I felt that I was answering all in rising abov
Jacques Charles
Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.’- "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds
Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Reynolds
DREAM INTERPRETATION Simplified.Everything's eitherconcave or -vex,so whatever you dreamwill be something with sex.
Piet Hein
Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadn’t I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasn’t it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?
Gaia B. Amman
The line between fiction and fact is at times factual and at times fictional
Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.
Robert Lanza
What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.
Mark Lawrence
To have no desire is such a load of bullshit--forgive me for being so blunt. To have no passion in one's life is a cop-out for cowards.
Irina Kovalyova
I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When the Universe is taken into account, nothing is impossible.
Massimo Marino
Praise can be your most valuable asset as long as you don't aim it at yourself.
O.A. Battista
One of the most lasting pleasures you can experience is the feeling that comes over you when you genuinely forgive an enemy - whether he knows it or not.
O.A. Battista
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man.
Mark Lawrence
The world admires wealth and velocity—these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When you become a father, it changes you." Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. "You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with.
Mark Lawrence
And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.
Mark Lawrence
You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
David Brin
Watching that great ship fly up, and up, and up against the night was an awakening, a vivid flash of something like God, something more powerful than nature itself. And it is us. And we know. We who have seen.
Charles Pellegrino