Quotes by Scientists - Page 7

As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls
Clifford A. Pickover
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
Mark Lawrence
When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.
Mark Lawrence
All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.
Emanuel Swedenborg
The Church has an excellent appetite. She has swallowed whole countries and the questionHas never risen of indigestion. Only the Church . . . can take Ill-gotten goods without stomach-ache!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning.
Mark Lawrence
It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport.
Fridtjof Nansen
The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.
Joseph Guth
ASTRO-GYMNASTICSGo on a starlit night, stand on your head,leave your feet dangling outwards into space,and let the starry firmament you treadbe, for the moment, your elected base.Feel Earth's colossal weight of ice and granite,of molten magma, water, iron, and lead;and briefly hold this strangely solid planetbalanced upon your strangely solid head.
Piet Hein
I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth's declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth. Our concern for it must come first, because the welfare of the burgeoning mass of humanity demands a healthy planet.
James E. Lovelock
Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.
David Kitts
The more you believe in the power of thought, and the more you listen to your breath, the greater changes you can create in your life.
Stig Åvall Severinsen
Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.
Vladimir I. Vernadsky
Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.
Alexander Graham Bell
Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.
Clifford A. Pickover
Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We grew up in a place without a hint of love. Perhaps this was the single thing that bound us forever.
Vadim Babenko
Sluka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.
Alastair Reynolds
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I will say nothing... against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Most people in this world are a continuity, very few become an opportunity and the rarest of them all, evolve to be a possibility.
Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
Grant me one hour on love’s most sacred shoresTo clasp the bosom that my soul adores,Lie heart to heart and merge my soul with yours.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
People work harder, longer, and more creatively if they are motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of their work. Managers must do everything they can to make the value of jobs obvious and the joy in them accessible.
Robert Watson
If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Now we have so many methods of communication: Land phone, Fax, Pager, Mobile phone, Texting, E mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram...and the list keeps growing.......But Communication itself has not improved!
Ankala V Subbarao
Most of the time, communication gets confused with conversation. In fact, the two are distinctly different.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
It is always better to try and fail than not to try.
Alastair Reynolds
I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.
Heinz von Foerster
In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
CANDLE WISDOM If you knewwhat you will knowwhen your candlehas burnt low,it would greatlyease your plightwhile your candlestill burns bright.
Piet Hein
This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.
Emanuel Swedenborg
The nature of heaven is to provide a place there for all who lead good lives, no matter what their religion may be.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Everything good or true that the angels inspire in us is God’s, so God is constantly talking to us. He talks very differently, though, to one person than to another.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.
Clifford A. Pickover
Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you’d live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The world turns gray, the air grows cool, the fog blows in. Only at evening can you really value home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.
Mark Lawrence
The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that's too heavy to carry.
Mark Lawrence
Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.
Mark Lawrence
THE WISDOM OF THE SPHERESHow instructiveis a star!It can teach usfrom afarjust how smalleach other are.
Piet Hein
You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.
Alastair Reynolds
It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.
Alastair Reynolds
Gratitude comes in a spectrum of colors, but Ingratitude is always black.
Ankala V Subbarao
Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so. Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris
René Descartes
Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am positive like a proton.........and just as acidic like the Hydrogen ion......
Ankala V Subbarao
Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs! And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need? Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm?
David Brin
It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.
David Brin
In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.
Sharon Moalem
Expiating a sin does not mean doing something opposite to wallow in guilt, but to use that same guilt to achieve full knowledge of the sin. The fault lies more not in having committed certain acts, rather in having carried them out without reaching their intimate knowledge. And this leads to committing a wrong again and again.
Massimo Marino
After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.
Mark Lawrence
A dog is a man's best friend........and a cat is a woman's..
Ankala Subbarao