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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index C > Category: Commencement

Commencement Quotes (14 quotes)

As the first monogamian family has improved greatly since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in our times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained.
As quoted in Charles H. Seaholm, The Kelts and the Vikings (1974), 48.
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At a distance in the meadow I hear still, at long intervals, the hurried commencement of the bobolink s strain, the bird just dashing into song, which is as suddenly checked, as it were, by the warder of the seasons, and the strain is left incomplete forever. Like human beings they are inspired to sing only for a short season.
(29 Jun 1851). In Henry David Thoreau and Bradford Torrey (ed.), The Writings of Henry Thoreau: Journal: II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (1906), 275.
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Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O'Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 322.
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From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!
Zoonomia, Or, The Laws of Organic Life, in three parts (1803), Vol. 1, 397.
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IODINE
It was Courtois discover'd Iodine
(In the commencement of this century),
Which, with its sisters, bromine and chlorine,
Enjoys a common parentage - the sea;
Although sometimes 'tis found, with other things,
In minerals and many saline springs.

But yet the quantity is so minute
In the great ocean, that a chemist might,
With sensibilities the most acute,
Have never brought this element to light,
Had he not thought it were as well to try
Where ocean's treasures concentrated lie.

And Courtois found that several plants marine,
Sponges, et cetera, exercise the art
Of drawing from the sea its iodine
In quantities sufficient to impart
Its properties; and he devised a plan
Of bringing it before us - clever man!
Anonymous
Discursive Chemical Notes in Rhyme (1876) by the Author of the Chemical Review, a B.
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It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.
'Preliminary discourse', to Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles (1812), trans. R. Kerr Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), 54-55.
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Life, therefore, has been often disturbed on this earth by terrible events—calamities which, at their commencement, have perhaps moved and overturned to a great depth the entire outer crust of the globe, but which, since these first commotions, have uniformly acted at a less depth and less generally. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races even have become extinct, and have left no memorial of them except some small fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognise.
'Preliminary discourse', to Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles (1812), trans. R. Kerr Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), 16-7.
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Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting.
In 20 Hrs., 40 Min. (1928), 310.
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Several of my young acquaintances are in their graves who gave promise of making happy and useful citizens and there is no question whatever that cigarettes alone were the cause of their destruction. No boy living would commence the use of cigarettes if he knew what a useless, soulless, worthless thing they would make of him.
Quoted in Henry Ford, The Case Against the Little White Slaver (1914), Vol. 1, 20.
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The hypothesis of the connexion of the first limestone beds with the commencement of organic life upon our planet is supported by the fact, that in these beds we find the first remains of the bodies of animated creatures.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), 57.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. … We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Opening of Chap 1, in An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), 7.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. The important applications of the science, the theoretical interest of its ideas, and the logical rigour of its methods all generate the expectation of a speedy introduction to processes of interest. We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Opening to An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), 7.
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The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir
In Science and the Modern World (1925), 2.
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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
Stanza from the Phi Beta Kappa poem 'Under Which Lyre (A Reactionary Tract for the Times)', which Auden wrote and delivered at the 1946 Victory Commencement of Harvard University (Jun 1946). Quoted in Adam Kirsch, 'A Poet's Warning', Harvard Magazine (Nov-Dec 2007) which gives more background on the poem. Also in Collected Poems of W.H. Auden (1976), 262.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
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Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
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Wilhelm Roentgen
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- 70 -
Samuel Morse
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Thomas Edison
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- 60 -
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Martin Fischer
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Karl Popper
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- 50 -
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Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
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- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
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JJ Thomson
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Archimedes
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- 30 -
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Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
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- 20 -
Carl Sagan
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- 10 -
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