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the penalty for transmuting base metals into gold—or trying to—or, in some places, even thinking about it—was death.
“Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers.
Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging—a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose.
“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,”
“You hold judicial proceedings in drinking-houses!?” “Poh! That judge is no more drunk than any magistrate of the Old Bailey.”
“Just so—if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”
for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.
“Quicksilver is the elementary form of all things fusible; for all things fusible, when melted, are changed into it, and it mingles with them because it is of the same substance with them…”
By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
“But it’s all a farce!” Leibniz muttered. “All Paris knows England’s in France’s pocket.” “All London knows it, too—the difference is that we have three dozen theatres here—Paris has only one of them—” Leibniz’s turn, finally, to be baffled. “I don’t understand.” “All I am saying is that we happen to enjoy farces.”
“So, I have complete freedom of action…but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is my nature to act in harmony with the world, and God partakes of that harmony.”
“Whatever acts, cannot be destroyed,”
The upright, conservative arch-Anglican had been replaced with a florid Papist, but nothing was really different—which taught Daniel that the world was full of powerful men but as long as they played the same roles, they were as interchangeable as second-rate players speaking the same lines in the same theatre on different nights.
to insist on everything’s being reasonable, in a world that wasn’t, was, in itself, unreasonable.
“I am working out the System of the World upstairs,” Isaac said offhandedly. “It is not beyond reason to think that Solomon and other ancients knew that System, and encrypted it in the design of their Temples.”
There was a Mr. Foot aboard God’s Wounds, one of those pleasant and harmless-seeming fellows to whom anyone will say anything, and who consequently knows everyone and everything.
