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Quote by Honoré de Balzac

“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.”

Quote by Honoré de Balzac

Book:The Wild Ass's Skin
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The Wild Ass's Skin

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Honoré de Balzac

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Book:Lucian's True History
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“The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.”

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Author:Peter B. Medawar
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“ملن کی رات آئی تھی۔ مگر کسی کے لئے کتنی مہیب اور خوفناک ، ڈر اور وحشت سے معمور ، اور کسی کیلئے کیسی چمک دار اور درخشندہ کائنات کی ساری خوشبوؤں سے بھر پور ایک ہی رات تھی۔ مگر دونوں کیلئے کتنی مختلف تھی ۔ لایی اطمینان کی ٹھنڈی سانس بھر کر گل کے سینے سے لگ کر سوگئی تھی۔ اور گل سوچ رہا تھا، یہ ایک رات میں دو راتیں کیسے ممکن ہیں ؟ ایک رات تاریک اور سیاہ ، گہری اور اتھاہ بدہیئت اور بدبو دار ، غلاظت اور نجاست سے معمور، اور دوسری رات ستھرے ستھرے جذبات والی ، معصوم اور پاکیزہ رات، جب کہکشاں مسکراتی ہے۔ اور چاندنی سیل رواں بن کر بہتی ہے اور افق سے افق تک کسی کے ذہن میں ستاروں کے پھول کھل جاتے ہیں۔ اور محبت کی آغوش وا ہو جاتی ہے ۔ اور کوئی اطمینان کی گہری ٹھنڈی سانس لے کر اپنے آپ کو کسی کے سپرد کر دیتا ہے ۔ ہاں ایک رات اور دوسری رات میں اتناہی فرق ہے، جتنا نیکی اور بدی میں ......”

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