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- I do not know what I may appear to the world;
- but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy
- playing on the seashore, and diverting myself
- now and then finding a smoother pebble
- or a prettier shell than ordinary,
- whilst the great ocean of truth
- lay all undiscovered before me. (Isaac Newton)
-
- Every generation has its own problems;
- it ought to find out its own solutions.
- There is no use in our living if we can't do things
- better than our fathers did. (Henry Ford)
-
- Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
- We know more about war than we know about peace,
- more about killing than we know about living.
- (General Omar Bradley)
-
- Let us build a pantheon for professors.
- It should be located among the ruins
- of one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan,
- and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe,
- in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words:
- SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD'S EDUCATORS.
- (Aldous Huxley, foreword to the 1946
- edition of "Brave New World")
-
- One day [Sir Richard] Burton was discussing Darwin
- with a Catholic archbishop. The prelate noticed
- some monkeys frisking nearby. "Well, Captain Burton,"
- the archbishop said, "there are some of your ancestors."
- Burton twirled his moustache and replied,
- "Well, I at least have made some progress.
- But what about your lordship who is descended from the angels?"
- The archbishop was not overly amused.
- (from "Fearless Adventurer: Sir Richard Burton",
- by Arthur Orrmont)
-
- Upon this marble bust that is not I
- Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;
- But in the forum of my silenced cry
- Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.
- I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;-
- Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
- Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
- Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
- The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
- Only my standard on a taken hill
- Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust
- And make immortal my adventurous will.
- Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
- Take up the song; forget the epitaph.
- ("To Inez Milholland", by Edna St. Vincent Millay,
- read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923,
- at the unveiling of a statue of three leaders
- in the cause of Equal Rights for Women.)
-
- The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
- With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour,
- Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
- Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
- - And this to fill us with regard for man,
- With apprehension of his passing worth,
- Desire to work his proper nature out,
- And ascertain his rank and final place,
- For these things tend still upward, progress is
- The law of life, man is not Man as yet.
- Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
- Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
- While only here and there a star dispels
- The darkness, here and there a towering mind
- O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host
- Is out at once to the despair of night,
- When all mankind alike is perfected,
- Equal in full-blown powers - then, not till then,
- I say, begins man's general infancy.
- (from "Paracelsus", by Robert Browning)
-
- Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
- The labor and the wounds are vain,
- The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
- And as things have been they remain.
- If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
- It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
- Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
- And, but for you, possess the field.
- For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
- Seem here no painful inch to gain,
- Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
- Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
- And not by eastern windows only,
- When daylight comes, comes in the light;
- In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
- But westward, look, the land is bright.
- (Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819-1861)
-
- [Douglas] Hofstadter has no shortage of metaphors for the mind.
- An ant colony. A labyrinth of rooms,
- with endless rows of doors flinging open and slamming shut.
- A network of intricate domino chains,
- branching apart and rejoining,
- with little timed springs to stand the dominoes back up.
- Velcro-covered marbles bashing around inside a "careenium".
- A wind chime, with myriad glass tinklers fluttering
- in the cross-breezes of its slowly twisting strands.
- (Gleick, James, from "Exploring the Labyrinth of the Mind",
- New York Times Magazine, August 21, 1983.)
-
- I like the dreams of the future
- better than the history of the past.
- (Thomas Jefferson)
-
-
- ne, August 21, 1983.)
-
- I like the dreams of the future
- better than the history of the past.
- (Thomas Jefferson)