The World Motivation
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
“If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses”
— John Ruskin · Science
Explore more quotes by John Ruskin on topics like Science, wisdom, and life lessons.
“If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses”
“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.”
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.”
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
“Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.”
“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.”
“The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”
“From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.”
“I am not afraid of a person who knows 10000 kicks. But I am afraid of a person who knows one kick but practices it for 10000 times.”
“Put it this way. If you or I were to build a machine, we'd go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn't work that way at all. It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives. The results are Rube Goldberg devices, but sturdy Rube Goldberg devices, unimaginably weird and densely layered Rube Goldberg devices, literally unimaginable in that our brains aren't adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell. I thought that was neat.”
“Your brain isn’t a rigid machine or a concrete structure that sets early in life and hardens with age. It’s endlessly flexible, endlessly capable of growth and transformation. This capacity for change is called neuroplasticity, and it's one of the most hopeful discoveries in modern science.”