Materials Quotes - Page 21

• It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

  Francois Jacob

  Science, Giving, Association

  François Jacob, Nadine Peyrieras, Michel Morange (2002). “Travaux scientifiques de François Jacob”, p.709, Odile Jacob

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• One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for the age of meteorites; and the estimated time for the tidal evolution of the Moon's orbit (though this is much rougher), all agree in their testimony, and, what is far more important, the red-shift in the nebulae indicates that this date is fundamental, not merely in the history of our system, but in that of the material universe as a whole.

  Henry Norris Russell

  Independent, Science, Moon

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• The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lying, Essence, Raw Materials

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man.

  Clarence Darrow

  Running, Moving, Men

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• I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Believe, Ideas, Two

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.153

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• You can think your self to be great, you can go on thinking your self to be great, till you see all fellow devotees going Back Home Back to Godhead, while you remain in this material world only.

  Radhanath Swami

  Humility, Home, Thinking

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• The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Attitude, Would Be

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.46, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Spiritual, Lying, Play

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850). “Representative Men: Seven Lectures”, p.7

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• Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.

  Horace Mann

  Education, Mean, Science

  Horace Mann (1957). “The Republic and the School: The Education of Free Men”

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• Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?

  Wernher von Braun

  God, Real, Airplane

  Letter to California State board of Education, September 14, 1972.

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• Ancient poets and sages have called the earth the mother of all things. They could hardly have chosen a more attractive name, or one that was more appropriate. From her lap springs everything that possesses life and motion, everything that flourishes, fades, and has its fated day, and she tirelessly provides material for the countless varied bodies that are created -- and then abandoned -- by the life force in its unending, hidden progress through nature.

  Jonas Hallgrimsson

  Mother, Gratitude, Spring

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• The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Biblical, Self

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• The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Biblical, Errors

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• When delivering something like an important letter or other written materials, grasp it firmly in your hand as you go and do not release it once, but hand it over directly to the recipient.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo

  War, Hands, Important

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo (2012). “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai”, p.21, Shambhala Publications

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• The gravest threat faced by the world is of an extremist group getting hold of nuclear weapons or materials.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Extremist Groups, Nuclear, World

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• One of our gravest concerns is the entry of a nuclear device or materials into the U.S.

  Charles E. Allen

  Nuclear, Terrorism, Concern

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• All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.

  Alain LeRoy Locke

  Spiritual, Epic, Class

  Alain LeRoy Locke (1983). “Crit Temp Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture”, Scholarly Title

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• I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.

  Paul Robeson

  Justice, Diversity, Achievement

  Paul Robeson (1998). “Here I Stand”, p.35, Beacon Press

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• The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

  Naomi Wolf

  Broken, Justice, Diversity

  1990 The Beauty Myth, ch.1, 'The Beauty Myth'.

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• No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.

  Andrew Young

  Islands, Should Have, Sea

  Andrew Young (1994). “A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young”, Thomas Nelson Incorporated

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• Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

  Jimmy Carter

  Home, Patriotic, Blessing

  Jimmy Carter's Farewell Address, January 14, 1981.

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• Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  God, Nature, Science

  Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (2015). “The Spirit of Laws”, p.14, Library of Alexandria

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• The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

  William James

  Philosophy, Educational, Order

  "Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals".

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• All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.

  William James

  Philosophy, Educational, Interesting

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.66, Harvard University Press

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• The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.

  William James

  Philosophy, Educational, Past

  William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.123, Nuvision Pubns

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