Bury Quotes (19 quotes)
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
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But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis... The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.
Letter to Rev. C. J. Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (22 Nov 1876). Quoted in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882), 394.
Call Archimedes from his buried tomb
Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse,
And feelingly the sage shall make report
How insecure, how baseless in itself,
Is the philosophy, whose sway depends
On mere material instruments—how weak
Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped
By virtue.
Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse,
And feelingly the sage shall make report
How insecure, how baseless in itself,
Is the philosophy, whose sway depends
On mere material instruments—how weak
Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped
By virtue.
In 'The Excursion', as quoted in review, 'The Excursion, Being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poem, The Edinburgh Review (Nov 1814), 24, No. 47, 26.
Far must thy researches go
Wouldst thou learn the world to know;
Thou must tempt the dark abyss
Wouldst thou prove what Being is;
Naught but firmness gains the prize,—
Naught but fullness makes us wise,—
Buried deep truth ever lies!
Wouldst thou learn the world to know;
Thou must tempt the dark abyss
Wouldst thou prove what Being is;
Naught but firmness gains the prize,—
Naught but fullness makes us wise,—
Buried deep truth ever lies!
In Edgar A. Bowring (trans.), The Poems of Schiller (1875), 260.
Goethe said that he who cannot draw on 3,000 years of learning is living hand to mouth. It could just as well be said that individuals who do tap deeply into this rich cultural legacy are wealthy indeed. Yet the paradox is that much of this wisdom is buried in a sea of lesser books or like lost treasure beneath an ocean of online ignorance and trivia. That doesn’t mean that with a little bit of diligence you can’t tap into it. Yet many people, perhaps most, never take advantage of all this human experience. They aren’t obtaining knowledge beyond what they need to know for work or to get by. As a result, their view of our amazing world is diminished and their lives greatly circumscribed.
In An Embarrassment of Riches: Tapping Into the World's Greatest Legacy of Wealth (2013), 65.
I should rejoice to see … Euclid honourably shelved or buried “deeper than did ever plummet sound” out of the schoolboys’ reach; morphology introduced into the elements of algebra; projection, correlation, and motion accepted as aids to geometry; the mind of the student quickened and elevated and his faith awakened by early initiation into the ruling ideas of polarity, continuity, infinity, and familiarization with the doctrines of the imaginary and inconceivable.
From Presidential Address (1869) to the British Association, Exeter, Section A, collected in Collected Mathematical Papers of Lames Joseph Sylvester (1908), Vol. 2, 657. Also in George Edward Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane (1982), 93. [Note: “plummet sound” refers to ocean depth measurement (sound) from a ship using a line dropped with a weight (plummet). —Webmaster]
I would request that my body in death be buried, not cremated so that the energy content contained within in gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I’ve dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.
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It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.
In 'People', Time (31 Oct 1969).
It is not the amount of oxygen that determines flammability, but its proportion in the mixture with nitrogen. About 40 per cent of the nitrogen on Earth is now buried in the crust; perhaps in the Cretaceous that nitrogen had not yet been buried and existed in the air and so kept the proportion of oxygen safer for trees [from greatly intensified forest fires].
In The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity (2006, 2007), 27.
J. J. Sylvester was an enthusiastic supporter of reform [in the teaching of geometry]. The difference in attitude on this question between the two foremost British mathematicians, J. J. Sylvester, the algebraist, and Arthur Cayley, the algebraist and geometer, was grotesque. Sylvester wished to bury Euclid “deeper than e’er plummet sounded” out of the schoolboy’s reach; Cayley, an ardent admirer of Euclid, desired the retention of Simson’s Euclid. When reminded that this treatise was a mixture of Euclid and Simson, Cayley suggested striking out Simson’s additions and keeping strictly to the original treatise.
In History of Elementary Mathematics (1910), 285.
No catastrophe has ever yielded so much pleasure to the rest of humanity as that which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum.
From the original German, about his visit to Pompeii (notes written in Naples, 13 Mar 1787), “Es ist viel Unheil in der Welt geschehen, aber wenig das den Nachkommen so viel Freude gemacht hätte.” in Italienische Reise Vol. 1 (1816), 220. [Goethe continued, “Ich weiß nicht leicht etwas Interessanteres,” meaning, “I don’t easily know anything more interesting.” This subject quote above may seem callous, but he no doubt refers to the elation of modern archaeologists in having such a rare chance to explore and learn from these mummified cities. There are variations in translation, such as: “Many disasters have befallen the world, but few have brought posterity so much joy,” in Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, 'William Hamilton and the ‘Art of Going Through Life’', Vases & Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (1996), 11. Or, translated freely with more sensitivity: “Of all the catastrophes which have been visited upon the world, few have bequeathed such enormous benefit to future generations,” cited in Erich Lessing, Pompeii (1996), 28.” —Webmaster]
Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.
Unverified. Need primary source. Can you help? Widely seem, but without citation, for example, in Jon, Michael and Deborah Fripp, Speaking of Science (2000), 203.
Objective conscience is the function of a normal being; the representative of God in the essence. Buried so deeply that it remains relatively indestructible.
In On Love & Psychological Exercises: With Some Aphorisms & Other Essays (1998), 52.
Peace cannot be obtained by wishing for it. We live in the same world with Russia, whose leader has said he “wants to bury us”—and he means it. Disarmament, the cessation of tests, will not automatically bring us closer to peace.
From debate (20 Feb 1958) between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller on WQED-TV, San Francisco. Transcript published as Fallout and Disarmament: The Pauling-Teller Debate (1958). Reprinted in 'Fallout and Disarmament: A Debate between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller', Daedalus (Spring 1958), 87, No. 2, 153.
Riches weigh more heavily upon talent than poverty. Under gold mountains and thrones, lie buried many spiritual giants.
From 'Autobiography' translated from the original German by Eliza Buckminster Lee, collected in Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter (1842), Vol. 1, 20.
Sometime in my early teens, I started feeling an inner urgency, ups and downs of excitement and frustration, caused by such unlikely occupations as reading Granville’s course of calculus ... I found this book in the attic of a friend’s apartment. Among other standard stuff, it contained the notorious epsilon-delta definition of continuous functions. After struggling with this definition for some time (it was the hot Crimean summer, and I was sitting in the shadow of a dusty apple tree), I got so angry that I dug a shallow grave for the book between the roots, buried it there, and left in disdain. Rain started in an hour. I ran back to the tree and exhumed the poor thing. Thus, I discovered that I loved it, regardless.
'Mathematics as Profession and vocation', in V. Arnold et al. (eds.), Mathematics: Frontiers and Perspectives (2000), 153. Reprinted in Mathematics as Metaphor: Selected Essays of Yuri I. Manin (2007), 79.
The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion.
A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (1796), preface, ix.
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries.
In 'Table-Talk', The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Volume 3 (1883), 1354.
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.
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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) -- 
