The Age of Wonder Quotes

“Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“He (the British soldier) is generally beloved by two sorts of Companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers of a Scarlet Coat.”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“in March 1769, concluding: ‘It is however some pleasure to be able to disprove that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers, of which sort most are who have wrote any thing about these seas without having themselves been in them. They”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Banks was twenty-six years old, tall and well-built, with an appealing bramble of dark curls. By temperament he was cheerful, confident and adventurous: a true child of the Enlightenment. Yet he had thoughtful eyes and, at moments, a certain brooding intensity: a premonition of a quite different sensibility, the dreaming inwardness of Romanticism. He did not like to give way to it. So he kept good company with his shipmates, and had carefully maintained his physical fitness throughout the first eight months of the voyage. He regarded himself — ‘thank god’ — as in as good mental and physical trim as a man could be. When occasionally depressed, he did vigorous jumping ‘rope exercises’ in his cabin, once nearly breaking his leg while skipping.1”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of
science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are
complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. HUMPHRY DAVY,”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’90”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! …5”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science