Nick Irving’s Reviews > Dinosaur in a Haystack > Status Update

King Lear's tragic error, which shall lead to blinding, madness, and death, lies in not recognizing that silence - overt nothing - can embody the deepest and most important meaning of all.

Nothing will come of nothing.

The world is indifferent to our hopes - and fire burns whether we like it or not.

"If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
. . .
"A person who ignores accumulate wisdom perishes in his own thin web."

If buttercups buzzed after the bee
If boats were on land, churches at sea
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows
If cats were chased into holes by the mouse
Then all the world would be upside down

An old Latin proverb tells us to "beware the man of only one book" - cave ab homine unius libri.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compressing arising from the traditionary faith and human interests on the other. Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them must take place.

A luminous star of the same density as the earth, but with a diameter 250 times greater than that of the sun, would not allow any of its light to reach us, by virtue of its own gravitational attraction. It is therefore possible that the largest luminous bodies in the universe are, for this reason, invisible.

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all celebrated one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

"Men believed that the orderly procession of the seasons and the laws of nature, which until then had ruled the world, had relapsed into the eternal chaos; and they feared that mankind would end."