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Past Quotes

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Past Quotes

“The Doctrine of Evolution states the fact that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future.”

Children States Facts Past Science Parent Evolution Future Doctrine

Book:The Outline of Science, First Volume

Source: The Outline of Science, First Volume

“No scientist or student of science, need ever read an original work of the past. As a general rule, he does not think of doing so. Rutherford was one of the greatest experimental physicists, but no nuclear scientist today would study his researches of fifty years ago. Their substance has all been infused into the common agreement, the textbooks, the contemporary papers, the living present.”

Thinking Needs Years Doe Today Past Science Common Study Students Paper Research Years Ago Scientist Originals Nuclear Contemporary Substance Fifty Agreement Papers Physicist Textbooks

Author:C.P. Snow

“This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? ... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.”

Ifs Knows Giving Body Past Science Asks Ability Knowledge Tools Accounts Originals Cumulative

Author:C.P. Snow

“Sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed and very spasmodic. This may be called the "Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of the Stratigraphical Record."”

May Past Science Records Phenomenon Rapids Geology

Author:D. V. Ager

“We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.”

Source: So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh

“It may be said of many palaeontologists, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper said recently of 18th century historians: "Their most serious error was to measure the past by the present".”

May Said Past Science Century Serious Errors Professors Historian 18th Century

Author:D. V. Ager

“If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).”

Ifs Wells Two Past Science Nature Natural Saws Century Function Assuming Physics Mathematical Engineering Equations Hammers Continuity Differential Equations

Book:The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward

Source: The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward

“We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!”

World Ideas Past Science Interesting Mountain Organized Acquire Sand Iron Sublime Coal Clay Monument Geology Felicity Incumbents Interesting Ideas

Book:Phytologia, or the philosophy of agriculture and gardening; with the theory of draining morasses and with an improved construction of the drill plough

Source: Phytologia, or the philosophy of agriculture and gardening; with the theory of draining morasses and with an improved construction of the drill plough

“There is no future. There is only now, a continuous now. We have become so wrapped up in the past and the future that we don't see the continuous now. There is no future. It is an idea that you have.”

Ideas Past Science Buddhism

Author:Frederick Lenz

“As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.”

I Can Past Science Language Quality Buddhism Structure Ridiculous Former Professors Grammar Symbolic Adjectives Differentiation Qualitative Pronouns Symbolic Meaning

Author:Frederick Lenz

“Our past affects us, our present affects us, and even our future can affect us. We live in the relative world of time and space.”

World Past Science Space Buddhism Our Future Relative Our Past Time And Space

Author:Frederick Lenz

“Computer science is the most misunderstood field there is. You are being paid to solve puzzles. For a person who has practiced meditation in past lives, that is the way your mind works.”

Way Mind Persons Past Science Meditation Fields Computer Paid Solve Puzzles Misunderstood Computer Science Past Life

Author:Frederick Lenz

“science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.”

Mind Long Whole Facts Past Science Values Individual Results Depends Long Time Research Discovery Embrace Complexes Enterprise Collectives Exception Inventor

Book:The Simone Weil Reader

Source: The Simone Weil Reader