Biographies Quotes - Page 21

• Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance.... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.

  David Levering Lewis

  Eric, Renaissance, May

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• The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

  Joseph Campbell

  Hero, Departure, Lasts

  Joseph Campbell (1949). “The hero with a thousand faces”

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• I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Talking, Long

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• Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Anxiety, Feelings

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• When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Rooms, Argument

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• With a thousand joys I would accept a nonacademic job for which industriousness, accuracy, loyalty, and such are sufficient without specialized knowledge, and which would give a comfortable living and sufficient leisure, in order to sacrifice to my gods [mathematical research]. For example, I hope to get the editting of the census, the birth and death lists in local districts, not as a job, but for my pleasure and satisfaction.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Loyalty, Jobs, Science

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• You ask whether I am going over to the history of science... no, I am not as old as that.

  Christopher Kelk Ingold

  Science, History Of Science, Asks

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• Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

  Enrico Fermi

  Science, Men, Names

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• [Flürscheim] was good at unanswerable arguments.

  Christopher Kelk Ingold

  Science, Argument

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• [George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.

  Abraham Pais

  Science, Issues, Reviews

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• [Herschel and Humboldt] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two. I copied out from Humboldt long passages about Teneriffe and read them aloud on one of [my walking excursions].

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Humble, Science

  Charles Darwin (1902). “Charles Darwin: His Life in an Autobiographical Chapter and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters”, p.46, Library of Alexandria

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• We must raise the salaries of our operators or they will all be taken from us, that is, all that are good for anything. You will recollect that, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, I took the ground that 'it was our policy to make the office of operator desirable, to pay operators well and make their situation so agreeable that intelligent men and men of character will seek the place and dread to lose it.' I still think so, and, depend upon it, it is the soundest economy to act on this principle.

  Samuel Morse

  Taken, Character, Science

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• To my deep mortification my father once said to me, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

  Charles Darwin

  Dog, Father, Science

  Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin (1958). “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose.

  Charles Darwin

  Uncles, Science, Offering

  Charles Darwin (2010). “The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29: “Erasmus Darwin” by Ernest Krause, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin; “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin” Edited by Nora Barlow; and Consolidated Index”, p.113, NYU Press

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• I do not want to write beyond this point, because those days when I studied relentlessly are nostalgic to me; and on the other hand, I am sad when I think how I have become increasingly preoccupied with matters other than study.

  Hideki Yukawa

  Writing, Science, Thinking

  Hideki Yukawa (1982). “Tabibito”, p.207, World Scientific

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• I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II.

  Michio Kaku

  Stars, War, Science

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• I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone...but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends...As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?

  Leon Croizat

  Art, Latin, Science

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• Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul's School.

  E. C. Bentley

  School, Science, Class

  'Biography for Beginners' (1905) 'Sir Humphrey Davy'

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• The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Weak

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.553, VM eBooks

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• The magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed on myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  School, Science, Titles

  Bronislaw Malinowski (2001). “Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski”, p.124, Psychology Press

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• The man who walks with Henslow.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Men, He Man

  Charles Darwin, John Stevens Henslow, Nora Barlow (1967). “Darwin and Henslow: The Growth of an Idea; Letters, 1831-1860”, p.7, Univ of California Press

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• The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.

  Davies Gilbert

  Character, Science, Discovery

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• Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.

  Robert Baden-Powell

  Life, Success, Suggestions

  Robert Baden-Powell (2013). “Playing the Game: A Baden-Powell Compendium”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

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• Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Father, Writing, Self Reliance

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.34, Harvard University Press

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• [Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Delight, Way

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