Consolation Quotes (9 quotes)
[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.
Quoted in 'Baby, It's You! And You, And You...', Time magazine (19 Feb 2001).
Je suis médecin. Je tiens boutique de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-on consoler et soulager sans mentir? … Les femmes et les médecins savent seuls combien le mensonge est nécessaire et bienfaisant aux hommes.
I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? … Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.
I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? … Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.
From the fictional Dr. Trublet in Histoire Comique (1900), 171-172. As translated in Lewis P. Shanks, Anatole France (1919), 165.
Medicus enim nihil aliud est quam animi consolatio
A doctor is nothing more than consolation for the spirit.
A doctor is nothing more than consolation for the spirit.
Satyricon, Cap. 42. In Iain Bamforth, The Body in the Library (2003), 298.
If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies...
Paper read to the French Academy of Sciences (29 Apr 1878), published in Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, 86, 1037-43, as translated by H.C.Ernst. Collected in Charles W. Eliot (ed.) The Harvard Classics, Vol. 38; Scientific Papers: Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology (1910), 366.
If there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather.
In The First Three Minutes (1977), 154-155.
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, that ‘a man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants,’ has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others. This feeling mercifully not only mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.
In The World As I See It (1934), 238.
Suppose that you are in love with a lady on Neptune and that she returns the sentiment. It will be some consolation for the melancholy separation if you can say to yourself at some possibly pre-arranged moment, “She is thinking of me now.” Unfortunately a difficulty has arisen because we have had to abolish Now. There is no absolute Now, but only the various relative Nows, differing according to their reckoning of different observers and covering the whole neutral wedge which at the distance of Neptune is about eight hours thick. She will have to think of you continuously for eight hours on end in order to circumvent the ambiguity “Now.”
In The Nature of the Physical World (1929), 49.
The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics.
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We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
In The Selfish Gene (1976).