World - Quotes
Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
In the development of mathematical ideas, one important initial driving force has always been to find mathematical structures that accurately mirror the behaviour of the physical world. But it is normally not possible to examine the physical world itself in such precise detail that appropriately clear-cut mathematical notions can be abstracted directly from it. Instead, progress is made because mathematical notions tend to have a "momentum" of their own that appears to spring almost entirely from within the subject itself. Mathematical ideas develop, and various kinds of problem seem to arise naturally.
How do I really feel about the possibility that all my actions, and those of my friends, are ultimately governed by mathematical principles (...)? I can live with that. I would, indeed, prefer to have these actions controlled by something residing in some (...) aspect of Plato`s fabulous mathematical world than to have them be subject to the kind of simplistic base motives, such as pleasure-seeking, personal greed, or aggressive violence, that many would argue to be the implications of a strictly scientific standpoint.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
Talents are best nurtured in solitude. Character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
There are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in this world.
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
It always feels like there is just one person in this world to love. And then you find somebody else, and it just seems crazy that you were ever worried in the first place.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.