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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index T > Category: Twice

Twice Quotes (20 quotes)

Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Said by the fictional Red Queen character, in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872, 1896), 36.
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A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.
A previously unpublished epigram, added in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949, 1956), 13-14.
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Behold the mighty dinosaur,
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his power and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains—
One in his head (the usual place),
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason 'A priori'
As well as 'A posteriori'.
No problem bothered him a bit
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along.
If something slipped his forward mind
'Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgment to revoke.
Thus he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
Oh, gaze upon this model beast
Defunct ten million years at least.
'The Dinosaur: A Poem' (1912). In E. H. Colbert (ed.), The Dinosaur Book (1951), 78.
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Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. … [T]hey warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.
In Walden: or, Life in the Woods (1854, 1899), 263.
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Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
As given in 'Quotable Quotes', Reader’s Digest (May 1933). It does not appear in a work written by Shaw. It may have been contributed to the magazine as a personal recollection, though that is not specified in that source.
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For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That’s a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they’re unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. - When Things Start to Think, 1999.
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I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
Epigraph Bruce L. Smith, Stories from Afield: Adventures with Wild Things in Wild Places (2016), Chap. 16, citing the TV program Life on Earth.
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If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.
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In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eat about twice as much as nature requires.
Louis Klopsch, Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1896), 67.
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Mathematics: A science that cannot explain what happens to a man if his wife is his better half and he marries twice.
In Esar’s Comic Dictionary (1943, 4th ed. 1983), 373.
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Oddly enough, eccentrics are happier and healthier than conformists. A study of 1,000 people found that eccentrics visit a doctor an average of just once every eight years, while conformists go twice a year. Eccentrics apparently enjoy better health because they feel less pressured to follow society’s rules, said the researcher who did the study at Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland.
Eccentrics (1995).Study results in SELF magazine - 1992 National Enquirer.
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Once when lecturing to a class he [Lord Kelvin] used the word “mathematician,” and then interrupting himself asked his class: “Do you know what a mathematician is?” Stepping to the blackboard he wrote upon it:— [an integral expression equal to the square root of pi]
Then putting his finger on what he had written, he turned to his class and said: “A mathematician is one to whom that is as obvious as that twice two makes four is to you. Liouville was a mathematician.”
In Life of Lord Kelvin (1910), 1139.
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Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight in cleverness.
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The difference between the long-term average of the graph and the ice age, 12,000 years ago, is just over 3°C. The IPCC 2001 report suggests that the line of the hockey stick graph might rise a further 5°C during this century. This is about twice as much as the temperature change from the ice age to pre-industrial times.
In The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity (2006, 2007), 67.
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The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.
Annals of the Former World
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The traditional mathematics professor of the popular legend is absentminded. He usually appears in public with a lost umbrella in each hand. He prefers to face a blackboard and to turn his back on the class. He writes a, he says b, he means c, but it should be d. Some of his sayings are handed down from generation to generation:
“In order to solve this differential equation you look at it till a solution occurs to you.”
“This principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible.”
“Geometry is the science of correct reasoning on incorrect figures.”
“My method to overcome a difficulty is to go round it.”
“What is the difference between method and device? A method is a device which you used twice.”
In How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (2004), 208.
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We have an extraordinary opportunity that has arisen only twice before in the history of Western civilization—the opportunity to see everything afresh through a new cosmological lens. We are the first humans privileged to see a face of the universe no earlier culture ever imagined.
As co-author with Nancy Ellen Abrams, in The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (2006), 297.
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We have little more personal stake in cosmic destiny than do sunflowers or butterflies. The transfiguration of the universe lies some 50 to 100 billion years in the future; snap your fingers twice and you will have consumed a greater fraction of your life than all human history is to such a span. ... We owe our lives to universal processes ... and as invited guests we might do better to learn about them than to complain about them. If the prospect of a dying universe causes us anguish, it does so only because we can forecast it, and we have as yet not the slightest idea why such forecasts are possible for us. ... Why should nature, whether hostile or benign, be in any way intelligible to us? All the mysteries of science are but palace guards to that mystery.
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What is right may well be said even twice.
Fragment 25, as translated by John Burnet in Oliver Joseph Thatcher (ed.) The Library of Original Sources (1907), Vol. 2, 162. Also translated as “What must be said, may well be said twice o’er”, in William Ellery Leonard (trans.), The Fragments of Empedocles (1908), 27.
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With old inflation riding the headlines, I have read till I am bleary-eyed, and I can’t get head from tails of the whole thing. ... Now we are living in an age of explanations—and plenty of ’em, too—but no two things that’s been done to us have been explained twice the same way, by even the same man. It’s and age of in one ear and out the other.
Newspaper column, for example in 'Complete Heads and Tails', St. Petersburgh Times (28 Jan 1934), 4. Collected in Will Rogers’ Weekly Articles: The Roosevelt Years (1933-1935) (1982), 91-92.
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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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