Quotations

  

I wish I’d said that.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900).

You will, Oscar, you will.
— James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), in response.

… 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 [new-born] state.
— James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879), A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote,
And think they grow immortal as they quote.
— Edward Young (1683 – 1765), Love of Fame.

I have a great respect for my namesake, and always say that if Erewhon had been a racehorse it would have been got by Hudibras out of analogy. Someone said this to me many years ago, and I felt so much flattered that I have been repeating the remark as my own ever since.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), Quis Desiderio …

What the outstanding person does, others will try to do. The standards such people create will be followed by the whole world.
— Bhagavad Gita, 3:21, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

I discovered to-day that I made a gross blunder in Literature and Science, attributing the phrase ‘Whom not to know argues yourself unknown’ to Shakespeare. It is by Milton — and the correct quotation is ‘Not to know me argues yourselves unknown’. If this is still correctable, I’d be grateful if you’d have it changed.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Ian Parsons, 1963, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 954.

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Time

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair….
— Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), A Tale of Two Cities.

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature.
— Daniel J Boorstin, The Discoverers, 1.

Our shelves are filled with formulas and speculations, and we still cannot say what time is; we cannot agree whether there is one time or many times, cannot even agree whether time is an essential ingredient of the universe, or whether it is the grand illusion of the human intellect.
— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, Penguin, 1990, 189.

I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay.
— Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), A Christmas Garland.

1. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven;
2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6. A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7. A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.
— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time.
— Ezra Loomis Pound (1885 – 1972), Make It New.

The world and time had both one beginning. The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.
— St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), The City of God.

The world was created on 22nd October, 4004 BCE at 6 o’clock in the evening.
— James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656), Chronologia Sacra. (Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, 451, has October 26 at 9 am).

MISS HARDCASTLE: Women and music should never be dated.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774) She Stoops to Conquer (Act 3).

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
— Robert Browning (1812 – 1889), Home Thoughts from Abroad.

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
— Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), To His Coy Mistress.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.
— Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678).

I apprehend that you are about 55 years old if so you have by the tables an expectation of 15 years’ life and in a climate like that which is the best I know, a still better expectation …
— Sir Joseph Banks, in a letter to Captain William Bligh, dated March 15, 1805, suggesting that he become Governor of New South Wales. HRA I, liii.

It is simply a bucket half filled with water, in which floats the half of a well-scraped cocoa-nut shell. In the bottom of this shell is a very small hole, so that when placed to float in the bucket a fine thread of water squirts up into it. This gradually fills the shell, and the size of the hole is so adjusted to the capacity of the vessel that, exactly at the end of an hour, plump it goes to the bottom.
— Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), The Malay Archipelago (1869), 314.

The candelabra still shown at the cathedral of Pisa, whose oscillations are alleged to have given Galileo his idea, was only installed several years after the discovery.
— Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Penguin edition, 593n.

I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done far better by a watch
— Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) On a Sundial.

Take a little time — count five-and-twenty.
— Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), Little Dorrit.

There was an old loony of Lyme,
Whose candour was simply sublime;
When they asked, ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but take care,
For I’m never ‘all there’ at a time.’
— Anon.

Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) Macbeth, I, iii, 146-7.

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Flight

Eagle-powered flight.

When Icarus and his father were escaping from a Cretan prison on wings made of wax and feathers, the young man ignored Daedalus’ warning not to fly too near the sun. The wax melted and Icarus fell into the sea south of Samos…
— Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Mythology, Harper & Row, 1970.

If a man is provided with a length of gummed linen cloth with a length of 12 yards on each side and 12 yards high, he can jump from any great height whatsoever without any injury.
— Leonardo da Vinci, notebook, 1483.

September 4: My nephew Edmond White launched a balloon on our down, made of soft thin paper; & measuring about two feet & a half in length, & 20 inches in diameter. The buoyant air was supplied at bottom by a plug of wooll, wetted with spirits of wine, & set on fire by a candle. The air being cold & moist, this machine did not succeed well abroad: but in Mr Yalden’s stair-case, it rose to the ceiling, & remained suspended as long as the spirits continued to flame, & then sunk gradually. These Gent: made the balloon themselves … but the position of the flame wanted better regulation; because the least oscillation set the paper on fire.

October 21: Edmond White launched an air-balloon from Selborne-down, measuring 8 feet and 1/2 in length, & 16 feet in circumference. It went off in a steady and grand manner to the east, and settled in about 15 minutes near Todmoor on the verge of the forest.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), Journal, (1784), MIT Press, 1970.

Jan. 7: On this day Mr Blanchard and Dr Jeffries rose in a balloon from Dover-cliff, & passing over the channel towards France, landed in the forest De Felmores, just 12 miles up into the country. They are the first aëronauts that have dared take a flight over the Sea!!
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), Journal, (1785), MIT Press, 1970.

We are now cruising at fifty-three thousand feet, with a ground speed of thirteen hundred fifty-five miles per hour. As we burn off fuel, the aircraft will float up to a peak altitude of roughly fifty-nine thousand feet. The outside air temperature is sixty degrees below zero Celsius, and the aircraft skin temperature is about one hundred degrees Celsius, this caused by friction as we pass through the air. One side effect of this is that the aircraft expands, becoming roughly eleven inches longer in midflight.
— Concorde pilot’s announcement in Tom Clancy, Patriot Games, 157.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
— Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.

No less an authority than Dr. B. W. Richardson, of London, spoke as follows at a tricycle club dinner in December, 1882: — “He (Dr. Richardson) remembered that it was said by Dr. Lardner that no vessel would ever be propelled across the Atlantic by steam. In like manner another philosopher had said that it would be impossible for a man to rotate himself more than six miles an hour, but he believed several tricylists and bicylists travelled twelve or fourteen miles an hour, and some experts had reached eighteen miles an hour, rivalling, in some respects, the steam-engine itself. He did not think he would be a false prophet if he assumed that the first principles of the problem of ærial flight would originate from the tricycle and bicycle…”
— The Queenslander, 8 September 1883, 412.

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Coaches

I left London by the Comet coach for Chesterfield, arrived at Chatsworth at half past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May, 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure-grounds, and looked around the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen-gardens, scaled the outside wall, and saw the whole of the place, set the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water-works, and afterwards, went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece (Sarah Brown); the latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.
— Joseph Paxton (1803 – 1865), quoted in Notes and Queries, 24 June 1865, 491.

Cobb’s coaches have the name of being very rough, – and more than once I have been warned against travelling by them. They were not fit, I was told, for an effeminate Englishman of my time of life. The idea that Englishmen, – that is, new-chums, or Englishmen just come from home, – are made of paste, whereas the Australian, native or thoroughly acclimatized, is steel all through, I found to be universal. On hearing such an opinion as to his own person, a man is bound to sacrifice himself, and to act contrary to the advice given, even though he perish doing so. This journey I made and did not perish at all; – and on arriving at Rosedale had made up my mind that twenty hours on a Cobb’s coach through the bush in Australia does not inflict so severe a martyrdom as did in the old days a journey of equal duration on one of the time-famous, much-regretted old English mails.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), pages 413-414.

The coach was a mail-coach, with four horses, running regularly on the road every day; – but on our return journey we were absolutely lost in the bush, – coach, coachman, horses, mails, passengers and all. The man was trying a new track, and took us so far away from the old track that no one knew where we were. At last we found ourselves on the seashore. Of course it will be understood that there was no vestige of a road or pathway. Travellers are often ‘bushed’ in Australia. hey wander off their paths and are lost amidst the forests. In this instance the whole mail-coach was ‘bushed’. When we came upon the sea, and no one could say what sea it was, I felt that the adventure was almost more than interesting.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), 685.

Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;
A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;
The mail-coach looming darkly by the light of moon and star;
The growl of sleepy voices; a candle in the bar;
A stumble in the passage of folk with wits abroad;
A swear-word from a bedroom — a shout of ‘All aboard!’
‘Tchk tchk! Git-up!’ ‘Hold fast there!’ and down the range we go;
Five hundred miles of scattered camps will watch for Cobb and Co.

Old coaching towns already decaying for their sins;
Uncounted “Half-Way Houses”, and scores of “Ten-Mile Inns”;
The riders from the stations by lonely granite peaks;
The black-boy for the shepherds on sheep and cattle creeks;
The roaring camps of Gulgong, and many a “Digger’s Rest”;
The diggers on the Lachlan; the huts of farther west;
Some twenty thousand exiles who sailed for weal or woe —
The bravest hears of twenty lands will wait for Cobb and Co.

The morning star has vanished, the frost and fog are gone,
In one of those grand mornings which but on mountains dawn;
A flask of friendly whisky — each other’s hopes we share —
And throw our top-coats open to drink the mountain air.
The roads are rare to travel, and life seems all complete;
The grind of wheels on gravel, the trot of horses’ feet,
The trot, trot, trot and canter, as down the spur we go —
The green sweeps to horizons blue that call for Cobb and Co.

We take a bright girl actress through western dusts and damps,
To bear the home-world message, and sing for sinful camps,
To stir our hearts and break them, wild hearts that hope and ache —
(Ah! when she thinks again of these her own must nearly break!)
Five miles this side the gold-field, a loud triumphant shout:
Five hundred cheering diggers have snatched the horses out:
With “Auld Lang Syne” in chorus, through roaring camps they go
That cheer for her, and cheer for home, and cheer for Cobb and Co.

Three lamps above the ridges and gorges dark and deep,
A flash on sandstone cuttings where sheer the sidlings sweep,
A flash on shrouded waggons, on water ghastly white;
Weird bush and scattered remnants of “rushes in the night”;
Across the swollen river a flash beyond the ford:
Ride hard to warn the driver! He’s drunk or mad, good Lord!
But on the bank to westward a broad and cheerful glow —
New camps extend across the plains new routes for Cobb and Co.

Swift scramble up the sidling where teams climb inch by inch;
Pause, bird-like, on the summit — then breakneck down the pinch;
By clear, ridge-country rivers, and gaps where tracks run high,
Where waits the lonely horseman, cut clear against the sky;
Past haunted half-way houses — where convicts make the bricks —
Scrub-yards and new bark shanties, we dash with five and six;
Through stringy-bark and blue-gum, and box and pine we go —
A hundred miles shall see tonight the lights of Cobb and Co.
— Henry Lawson, The Lights of Cobb and Co.

The rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), Self-Reliance.

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Liberty

Augustus Earle, Gaol Gang

One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it. Though many scientists talk easily and well about particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 47.

Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.
— Herman Melville (1819 – 1891), The Bell-Tower.

Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great … it would have been all right… I believe that to have interfered as I have done — in defense of His despised poor, was not wrong but right.
— John Brown (1800 – 1859), at his trial in Charlestown, Virginia.

All that glisters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons.
— J. D. Bernal (1901 – 1971), Lecture.

Freedom and Whisky gang thegither!
— Robert Burns (1759 – 1796), The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer.

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Vision and art

Seeing amounts to feeling and stimulation of the retina, which is painted with the coloured rays of the visible world. The picture must then be transmitted to the brain by a mental current, and delivered at the seat of the visual faculty.

— Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), quoted by Henry King, The History of the Telescope, Dover edition, 1979, 45.

Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will not pay a farthing for it.
— Oliver Cromwell, quoted in Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, ch. 12.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness
by his electrical skin and glaring eyes …
— Christopher Smart (1722-1771) Jubilate Agno XX, 15.

BOSWELL: ‘Had not you some desire to go upon this expedition, sir?’

JOHNSON: ‘Why, yes; but I soon laid it aside. Sir, there is very little of intellectual in the course. Besides, I see but a small distance. So it was not worth my while to go see birds fly which I should not have seen fly; and fishes swim, which I should not have seen swim.’
— Dr Johnson explains why he did not tour the South Sea, New Zealand and Australia on HM bark Endeavour. Quoted in Barton’s History of NSW from the Records, Vol I, lv.

Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?
— Mae West (1893 – 1980), She Done Him Wrong (1933).

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.
— Holy Bible, Gospel according to St Matthew, 18:9.

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Human evolution

Piltdown was a hoax that went wrong.

From a study of the femur and the skull it follows with certainty that this fossil cannot be classified as simian … And as with the skull, so also with the femur, the differences that separate Pithecanthropus from man are less than those distinguishing it from the highest anthropoid … Although far advanced in the process of differentiation, this Pleistocene form had not yet attained to the human type. Pithecanthropus erectus is the transition form between man and the anthropoids which the laws of evolution teach us must have existed. He is the ancestor of man.
— Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (1858 – 1940), quoted in Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals, Vintage 1994, 140.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
— Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), An Essay on Man.

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape, self-named Homo sapiens.
— Desmond Morris (1928 – ), The Naked Ape.

Descended from the apes? My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.
— Alleged to have been said by the wife of a canon of Worcester Cathedral.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910). Following the Equator.

Nevertheless an unexpected hindrance has arisen. Dr. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum, using the fluorine dating method (fluorine content of a fossil bone increases with age), has shown that the Piltdown skull, instead of being an early ‘dawn man’, probably belongs to the third interglacial.
— Loren C. Eiseley (1907 – 1977), ‘The Antiquity of Modern Man’, Scientific American Reader (1953), 462.

But the most remarkable implement, fashioned in all probability by Eoanthropus himself, is a piece of bone which has been taken from the femur of some ancient species of elephant — not the mammoth, but a larger elephant, probably E. antiquus. It is a more or less flat slab, sixteen inches long by four inches wide and one to two inches thick. It is truncated at the base by transverse cuts which have been achieved with difficulty and at the other it is rudely cut into a sort of wedge. Its purpose is unknown, but, as Prof. Breuil remarks, the man who made it must have been accustomed to working in wood. Bone implements are not known elsewhere before the Mousterian period and do not become common until much later.

But the Piltdown bone is sui generis, no other Palaeolithic age has produced anything like it.
— W. J. Sollas (1849 – 1936), Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives, London: Macmillan, 1924. The object in question is the ‘Piltdown cricket bat’.

Coolidge is a better example of evolution than either Bryan or Darrow, for he knows when not to talk, which is the biggest asset the monkey possesses over the human.
— Will Rogers (1879 – 1935)

There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay. Bodies have been found which must have lain in bogs for more than a thousand years, but which, though admittedly somewhat shrunken and brown, are in other respects unchanged.
— Danish almanac of 1837, quoted by Peter V. Glob (1911 – 1985), The Bog People.

POOH-BAH: You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable.
— W. S. Gilbert (1836 – 1911), The Mikado, Act I.

There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
            For he said, ‘It appears
            That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune’.
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944), New Pathways in Science.  

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