Robert Chambers > Quotes

“From year to year, and from age to age, we see [biologists] at work, adding no doubt much to the unknown, and advancing many important interests, but, at the same time, doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature. Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust.”
― Robert Chambers

“Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clamb for thee,
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,
And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me.”
― Robert Chambers

“Edinburgh was, at the beginning of George III's reign, a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town of about seventy thousand inhabitants. A stranger approaching the city, seeing it piled 'close and massy, deep and high' - a series of towers, rising from a palace of the plain to a castle in the air - would have thought it a truly romantic place; and the impression would not have subsided much on a near inspection, when he would have found himself admitted by a fortified gate through an ancient wall, still kept in repair.”
― Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh

“This man has been disagreeable to you, and I want to tell you that any time you feel inclined to kick him, why, I will hold the other creature.”
― Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow

“Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual, in mass, he is a mathematical problem”
― Robert Chambers