Strong Sentences and Pretty Prose (Favorite Quotations)

James Clerk Maxwell

Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity.
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state…
Talking about electromagnetic fields:
- The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these vibrations; and after carrying them in its immense bosom for three years, delivers them in due course, regular order, and full tale into the spectroscope of Mr Huggins, at Tulse Hill.
- we are obliged to admit that the undulations are those of an ethereal substance, and not of the gross matter

Erwin Schrodinger

We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them - and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.
Rising to their feet after centuries of shameful servitude imposed by the Church, conscious of their sacred rights and their divine mission, the natural sciences turned against their ancient tormentress with blows of rage and hatred.

Pope Pius XII

During an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences with Lemaitre in the audience said, “Contemporary science with one sweep back across the centuries has succeeded in bearing witness to the August instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation […] Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, modern science has confirmed the contingency of the Universe and also the well founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.” (Lemaitre is known to have gotten worried about this and requested the pope to not make comments on scientific cosmology anymore - because he obviously understood even further nuances of cosmology and not just religion)

Giordano Bruno

Now unconfined the wings stretch out to heaven,
Nor shrink beneath a crystal firmament
Aloft into the aether’s fragrant deeps,
Leaving below the earth-world with its pain,
And all the passions of mortality’

Virgil, Dryden’s Translations

The gates of hell are open night day;
Smooth is the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies
In this the task and might labor lies

TS Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Seneca

You act like mortals in all that you fear and like immortals in all that you desire
No man has been shattered by the blows of fortune who was not first deceived by her gifts
There are those too who toss around like insomniacs, changing their positions until they find rest through sheer weariness

William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

A S Eddington

However successful the theory of a four-dimensional world may be, it is difficult to ignore a voice inside us which whispers: “At the back of your mind, you know that a fourth dimension is all
nonsense.” I fancy that that voice must often have had a busy time in the past history of physics. What nonsense to say that this solid table on which I am writing is a collection of electrons
moving with prodigious speeds in empty spaces, which relatively to electronic dimensions are as wide as the spaces between the planets in the solar system! What nonsense to say that the thin
air is trying to crush my body with a load of 14 lbs to the square inch! What nonsense that the star cluster which I see through the telescope obviously there now, is a glimpse into a past age
50 000 years ago! Let us not be beguiled by this voice.

Pindar, Pythian III

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible

Stephen Jay Gould

The beauty of nature is in its details, the message in generality.

Richard Fortey

It has been estimated that the lava must have gushed out at a rate of hundreds of metres per second, which can be compared with the discharge from some of the world’s largest rivers. What a sight it must have been at night! Having resisted the ‘rivers of fire’ cliché when writing of Hawai’i, this is surely the place to apply it without embarrassment. Floods of flaming fury; a Ganges of geological gaudiness; an Indus of inflagration; it is scarcely possible to go over the top. (about the super plume that created the Deccan Traps, from Earth and Intimate History)
Quoting Eduard Seuss in Vol. 2 of Das Antlitz der Erde “As Rama looks out upon the Ocean, its limits mingling and uniting with heaven on the horizon, and as he ponders whether a path might not be built in to the Immeasurable, so we look over the Ocean of time, but nowhere do we see signs of a shore.”

David Abraham

The opening paragraph from “The Spell of the Sensous”

Late one evening I stepped out of my little hut in the
rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling
through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling
with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out
the darkness between them , and more loosely scattered in other
areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all
streamed the great river of light with its several tributaries. Yet the
Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the
middle of a large patchwork of rice p addies, separated from each
other by narrow two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all
filled with water. The surface of these pools, by day, reflected per
fectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright green
tips of new rice. But by night the stars themselves glimmered from
the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the
darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in
front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away
forever.

Describing a hike in the Himalayas

Instantly, the condor swung out from its path and began soaring back in a wide arc. Once again, I watched its shape grow larger. As the great size of the bird became apparent, I felt my skin begin to crawl and come alive, like a swarm of bees all in motion, and a humming grew loud in my ears. The coin continued rolling along my fingers. The creature loomed larger, and larger still, until, suddenly, it was there—an immense silhouette hovering just above my head, huge wing feathers rustling ever so slightly as they mastered the breeze. My fingers were frozen, unable to move; the coin dropped out of my hand. And then I felt myself stripped naked by an alien gaze infinitely more lucid and precise than my own. I do not know for how long I was transfixed, only that I felt the air streaming past naked knees and heard the wind whispering in my feathers long after the Visitor had departed.

J. B. Cabell

"to hold that we know nothing assuredly, and never can know anything assuredly, is to take too much on faith” (Stein presumes following Arcesilaus)

Jorge Luis Borges

I wish to record here an experience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought.
To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges