Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Man is embedded in nature.
We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.
Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.
Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.
Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.
Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.
Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
Things are bound to begin happening if you've got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.
The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.
It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.
It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.
If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.
Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.
Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.
Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.
Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.
The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.
Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.
Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.