Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1)

by Neal Stephenson

This tay is inoffensive enough, but I don’t think Englishmen will ever take to anything so outlandish.”

there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish.

Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin.

You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin.

True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”

crushed between millstones, mixed with burning-lead, shoveled into a chimney-like furnace blown by great mule-powered

I have come to the conclusion that the true benefit of religion is not to make people virtuous, which is impossible, but to put a sort of bridle on the worst excesses of their viciousness.