Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)

by Neal Stephenson

“I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “Someone has to come up with new ideas.”

Most of them watched but didn’t see. Jack had found that people watching executions, even if they kept open eyes turned to the entire performance, did not really see the death, and could not remember it later, because what they were really doing was thinking about their own deaths.

Trade, like Religion, is what every Body talks of, but few understand: The very Term is dubious, and in its ordinary Acceptation, not sufficiently explain’d.

It was easier to flaunt Eliza than to hide her.

“He’s accomplishing nothing—that’s very different from doing nothing,” Enoch said gravely.

greed for knowledge drawing them closer, and fear pushing them back.

what does the Doctor want?” “To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers—and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy—whatever that means.”

In a place where all things were suffused with quicksilver, it was necessary to blur the transition from earth to water, making out of the whole Republic a gradual shading from one to the other as they neared the banks of the Ij, not entirely complete until they got past the sandbanks and reached the ocean at Texel.

“Mad with syphilis, actually,” Jack said, “but still mad enough to go back.”

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.

Newton and Hooke see things that you and I don’t. Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls.”

For the market is against our sex just now; and if a young woman has beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all to an extreme, yet if she has not money she’s nobody, she had as good want them all; nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands. —DANIEL DEFOE, Moll Flanders

It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice.

The gold that paid for a pound of Malabar pepper was melted and fused with the gold that paid for a boatload of North Sea herring, and all of it was simply gold, bearing no trace or smell of the fish or the spice that had fetched it. In the case of Cœlestial Dynamics, the gold—the universal medium of exchange, to which everything was reduced—was force.

The only God here—” Isaac slammed the page hard “—is the God of Spinoza, a God that is everything and therefore nothing.”

“As I told you, I seek God where Geometry fails.”

“The inner workings of gravity, you seem to be saying, are beyond the grasp, or even the reach, of Natural Philosophy. To whom should we appeal, then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?” “They are all the same to me,” Isaac said, “and I am one.”

Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life.

“You wish to know where the sun is at noon—?” “You have it precisely backwards. Noon is when the sun is in a particular place. Noon has no meaning otherwise.” “So, you wish to know when noon is.”

Even a well-made clock drifts, and must be re-set from time to time.

“It is all right for a clock to run fast or slow at times, so long as it is calibrated against the sun, and set right.

Only small minds want always to be right. —LOUIS XIV

No man goes so high as he who knows not where he is going. —CROMWELL

“RIDING BARE-BACK IS LIKE RIDING, only more so,”

Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ‘tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”

for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns.

For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature.

Unlike the Alchemists, who see angels, demons, miracles, and divine essences everywhere, I recognize nothing in the world but bodies and minds.

Everything else is merely said, not understood; it is sounds without meaning. Nor can anything in the world be understood clearly unless it is reduced to these. Unless physical things can be explained by mechanical laws, God cannot, even if He chooses, reveal and explain nature to us.

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.

If I were a man, I’d say I was unmanned. As I am a woman, I’ll say I am over-womanned.