Biographies Quotes - Page 16

• I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!

  Richard Goldschmidt

  Knowledge, Exercise, Science

  7 Copy quote

• The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Facts, Moral

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.362, Princeton University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] ... Fourier's great mathematical poem.

  Lord Kelvin

  Science, Heat, Theory

  4 Copy quote

• I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.

  Steven Chu

  Sports, Adventure, Science

  4 Copy quote

• The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

  Francis Darwin

  Strong, Book, Holiday

  Sir Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin (1925). “The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.

  Albert Einstein

  Character, Fate, Science

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.35, Open Road Media

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer's lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.

  Robert Bunsen

  Determination, Stars, Sleep

  14 Copy quote

• I had fallen in love with a young man... and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Science, Men, Discovery

  "Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants". Book by Susan A. Ambrose, Barbara B. Lazarus and Indira Nair, 1997.

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches

  Georges Cuvier

  Science, Discovery, Blood

  16 Copy quote

• If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Nature, Science, Years

  4 Copy quote

• A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Giving, Mathematics

  Howard Baer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Alexander Belyaev (2003). “Proceedings of the Dirac Centennial Symposium: Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA, 6-7 December 2002”, p.45, World Scientific

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Records, Able

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays ...”, p.7

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.

  Charles Darwin

  Determination, Book, Science

  8 Copy quote

• I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge-adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

  Louis Agassiz

  God, Knowledge, Science

  50 Copy quote

• You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

  Anthony Marra

  Coward, Said, Prophecy

  4 Copy quote

• The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

  Bernard Malamud

  Time, Past, Clay

  Dubin's Lives (1979) p. 20

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Death, Events, World

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography”, p.546, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

  Virginia Woolf

  War, Men, History

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.630, Wordsworth Editions

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Self, Poetry, Understanding

  1985 In the New York Times, 12 May.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

  Alan Ayckbourn

  Work, Sleep, Thinking

  Alan Ayckbourn (1988). “The Norman Conquests: A Trilogy of Plays”, p.215, Grove Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi's, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin.

  Jimmy Carter

  Hard Work, Knowledge, Character

  United States. President (1977-1981 : Carter), Jimmy Carter (1978). “Jimmy Carter”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Motivational, Fear, Women

  101 Copy quote

• Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.

  Mark Twain

  Atheist, Character, Angel

  Mark Twain (1995). “The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood”, p.319, University of Georgia Press

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

  Charles Babbage

  Writing, Ambition, Mean

  Charles Babbage (2013). “On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings”, p.5, Courier Corporation

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.

  Jonas Salk

  Ambition, Science, Thinking

  10 Copy quote