Delicious Quotes (4 quotes)
I always enjoyed the hearty society of a snowstorm; glad, though solemn, when within a mile or two of safe ground where a storm-nest could be made. Now on this shattered ice I need my eyes, but the snow, gyrating, whirling, and sifting, the very incarnation of spasmodic hysterical mirth, fills them, and I am blinded as if blinded by kisses, delicious in the eye, and sweet.
Journal Entry, while camping on Muir Glacier, Alaska (19? Jul 1890). In John Muir and Linnie Marsh Wolfe (ed.), John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (1938, 1979), 321.
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
…...
The science of calculation … is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic equation and the use of logarithms are often of value in ordinary cases: but all beyond these is but a luxury; a delicious luxury indeed; but not to be indulged in by one who is to have a profession to follow for his subsistence.
In Letter (18 Jun 1799) to William G. Munford. On founders.archives.gov website.
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
Ends and Means: an Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into Methods Employed for their Realization (1937), 310.
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) -- 
