Islomjon > Islomjon's Quotes

“Always seek wisdom and live a virtuous life.”
― Plato

“Ты поступил бы мудро, спустив паруса поспешности и бросив якорь раскаяния в порту смирения, который также является портом безопасности.”
― Tamerlane

“Драма жизни не несёт в себе тотальной предопределённости.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues, planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open to our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders in a dark labyrinth.”
― Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore

“The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a larger part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known.”
― Paul Dirac

“At the beginning of the twentieth century we understood the workings of nature on the scales of classical physics that are good down to about a hundredth of a millimetre. The work on atomic physics in the first thirty years of the century took our understanding down to lengths of a millionth of a millimetre. Since then, research on nuclear and high-energy physics has taken us to length scales that are smaller by a further factor of a billion. It might seem that we could go on forever discovering structures on smaller and smaller length scales. However, there is a limit to this series as with a series of nested Russian dolls. Eventually one gets down to a smallest doll, which can’t be taken apart any more. In physics the smallest doll is called the Planck length and is a millimetre divided by a 100,000 billion billion billion. We are not about to build particle accelerators that can probe to distances that small.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“In the eighteenth century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you many tens of thousands of years to read through the books in a national library. By which time, many more books would have been written.
This has meant that no one person can be the master of more than a small corner of human knowledge. People have to specialise, in narrower and narrower fields. This is likely to be a major limitation in the future. We certainly cannot continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last 300 years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the greenhouse effect becoming unstable.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“Intellectual fascination crosses many boundaries.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle; a miracle in that it is wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Bacteria simply divide themselves in two when the time seems right, as can many single-celled eukaryotes. Many plants and animals have the ability to reproduce themselves on their own quite comfortably. Even among the species that do reproduce sexually, many can switch over to cloning. If you walk through a stand of hundreds of quaking aspen trees on a Colorado mountainside, you may be walking through a forest of clones,
produced not by seeds but by the roots of a single tree that come back up out of the ground to form new saplings.
Hermaphrodites, such as sea slugs and earthworms, are equipped with male and female sex organs and can fertilize themselves or mate with another. Some species of lizards are all mothers: in a process called parthenogenesis, they somehow trigger their unfertilized eggs to start developing. Compared with these other ways to reproduce, sex is slow and costly. A hundred parthenogenetic female lizards can produce far more offspring than fifty males and fifty females. In only fifty generations, a single cloning lizard could swamp the descendants of a million sexual ones.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!”
― Mark A. Cooper, Operation Einstein

“All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

“There is much creativity underlying math and science problem solving. Many people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, but there are often a number of different solutions, if you have the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean theorem.”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“It has been determined that luminous matter—the stars and hot gas we see in the sky by eye and instrument—constitutes a mere 0.5 percent of the total mass of our universe. Another 4.5 percent is nonluminous matter, such as planets and dead stars, made of the same familiar atoms. In addition, 26 percent is composed of something different than atoms or their constituent elementary particles. Dubbed dark matter, it remains unidentified. The remaining, dominant 69 percent of the universe is an even more mysterious dark energy that has resulted in an accelerating expansion of the universe that will continue indefinitely into the future, making the universe increasingly dilute.”
― Victor J. Stenger, God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos

“Oceans today represent only about 0.02 percent of Earth’s total mass, while the atmosphere is no more than one part per million of its bulk. Nevertheless, oceans and atmosphere have exerted, and continue to exert, disproportionately large influences in making Earth the unique world that it is.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“Four and a half billion is a number almost beyond reckoning. The current Guinness world record for longevity is held by a French woman who lived to celebrate her 122nd birthday—so humans fall far short of living even for 4.5 billion seconds (about 144 years). All of recorded human history is much less than 4.5 billion minutes. And yet geologists claim that Earth has been around for more than 4.5 billion years.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“Today we experience oxygen in the most intimate exchange. With every breath we take, a tiny portion of the air becomes a part of us, even as a tiny part of us becomes the air. As days pass, our bodies melt away and form again in moment-by-moment chemical reactions with oxygen. Our tissues are replaced over and over again throughout our lives, Earth’s finite store of atoms recycling among air, sea, land, and all its living forms. Most of the atoms that formed your infant body at birth are now dispersed, as your present atoms will be again, if you have the good fortune to live a few more years on this oxygen-rich planetary home.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“I have only to renew my pact with Solitude, to which I have tried to be unfaithful.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas