TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Politics is more difficult than physics.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index D > Category: Dwarf

Dwarf Quotes (7 quotes)

[The ancient monuments] were all dwarfs in size and pigmies in spirit beside this mighty Statue of Liberty, and its inspiring thought. Higher than the monument in Trafalgar Square which commemorates the victories of Nelson on the sea; higher than the Column Vendome, which perpetuates the triumphs of Napoleon on the land; higher than the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, which exhibit the latest and greatest results of science, invention, and industrial progress, this structure rises toward the heavens to illustrate an idea ... which inspired the charter in the cabin of the Mayflower and the Declaration of Independence from the Continental Congress.
Speech at unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, New York. In E.S. Werner (ed.), Werner's Readings and Recitations (1908), 107.
Science quotes on:  |  Ancient (198)  |  Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte (20)  |  Bridge (49)  |  Brooklyn Bridge (2)  |  Charter (4)  |  Column (15)  |  Commemorate (3)  |  Congress (20)  |  Declaration (10)  |  Declaration Of Independence (5)  |  Greatest (330)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Heavens (125)  |  Higher (37)  |  Idea (881)  |  Industrial (15)  |  Inspire (58)  |  Invention (400)  |  Mighty (13)  |  Monument (45)  |  Napoleon (16)  |  Perpetuate (11)  |  Pigmy (4)  |  Progress (492)  |  Result (700)  |  Rise (169)  |  Sea (326)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Square (73)  |  Statue (17)  |  Statue Of Liberty (2)  |  Structure (365)  |  Thought (995)  |  Tower (45)  |  Trafalgar (2)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Victory (40)

In the past century, there were more changes than in the previous thousand years. The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.
Referring to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Lecture, 'Discovery of the Future' at the Royal Institution (1902). Quoted in Martin J. Rees, Our Final Hour: a Scientist's Warning (2004), 9.
Science quotes on:  |  Century (319)  |  Change (639)  |  Last (425)  |  More (2558)  |  New (1273)  |  Past (355)  |  See (1094)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Will (2350)  |  Year (963)

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
In The Time Machine (1898), 144.
Science quotes on:  |  Distance (171)  |  Drift (14)  |  Future (467)  |  Gravity (140)  |  Inevitable (53)  |  Life (1870)  |  Looking (191)  |  Movement (162)  |  Past (355)  |  Slow (108)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Sudden (70)  |  Suddenly (91)  |  Terrestrial (62)  |  Thought (995)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Unfathomable (11)  |  Unknown (195)

Standing beside each other, we feasted our eyes. Above us the cerulean sky deepened to an inky black as the remnants of the atmosphere gave way to the depths of space. The mighty Himalaya were now a sparkling relief map spread out before us and garnished with a gleaming lattice work of swirling glaciers. Even Cho Oyu, Lhotse and Makalu, all 8,000-meter giants, were dwarfed. To the east and west, Kanchenjunga and Shishapangma, two more great sentinels of the Himalaya, stood crystal clear over 100 kilometers away. To the north were the burnished plains of Tibet, and to the south the majestic peaks and lush foothills of Nepal. We stood on the crown jewel of the earth, the curved horizon spinning endlessly around us.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Atmosphere (117)  |  Black (46)  |  Clear (111)  |  Crown (39)  |  Crystal (71)  |  Curve (49)  |  Deepen (6)  |  Depth (97)  |  Earth (1076)  |  East (18)  |  Endlessly (4)  |  Eye (440)  |  Feast (5)  |  Foothill (3)  |  Garnish (3)  |  Giant (73)  |  Give (208)  |  Glacier (17)  |  Gleam (13)  |  Great (1610)  |  Horizon (47)  |  Jewel (10)  |  Kilometer (10)  |  Lattice (2)  |  Lush (5)  |  Majestic (17)  |  Map (50)  |  Mighty (13)  |  More (2558)  |  Nepal (2)  |  North (12)  |  Other (2233)  |  Peak (20)  |  Plain (34)  |  Relief (30)  |  Remnant (7)  |  Sky (174)  |  South (39)  |  Space (523)  |  Sparkle (8)  |  Sparkling (7)  |  Spin (26)  |  Spinning (18)  |  Spread (86)  |  Stand (284)  |  Swirl (10)  |  Tibet (4)  |  Two (936)  |  Way (1214)  |  West (21)  |  Work (1402)

The particular ‘desire’ of the Eregion Elves—an ‘allegory’ if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices—is also symbolised by their special friendship with the Dwarves of Moria.
From Letter draft to Peter Hastings (manager of a Catholic bookshop in Oxford, who wrote about his enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings) (Sep 1954). In Humphrey Carpenter (ed.) assisted by Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995, 2014), 190, Letter No. 153.
Science quotes on:  |  Allegory (8)  |  Desire (212)  |  Device (71)  |  Elf (7)  |  Friendship (18)  |  Lord Of The Rings (6)  |  Love (328)  |  Machinery (59)  |  Special (188)  |  Symbolise (2)  |  Technology (281)

The Sun is no lonelier than its neighbors; indeed, it is a very common-place star,—dwarfish, though not minute,—like hundreds, nay thousands, of others. By accident the brighter component of Alpha Centauri (which is double) is almost the Sun's twin in brightness, mass, and size. Could this Earth be transported to its vicinity by some supernatural power, and set revolving about it, at a little less than a hundred million miles' distance, the star would heat and light the world just as the Sun does, and life and civilization might go on with no radical change. The Milky Way would girdle the heavens as before; some of our familiar constellations, such as Orion, would be little changed, though others would be greatly altered by the shifting of the nearer stars. An unfamiliar brilliant star, between Cassiopeia and Perseus would be—the Sun. Looking back at it with our telescopes, we could photograph its spectrum, observe its motion among the stars, and convince ourselves that it was the same old Sun; but what had happened to the rest of our planetary system we would not know.
The Solar System and its Origin (1935), 2-3.
Science quotes on:  |  Accident (92)  |  Alpha Centauri (2)  |  Alter (64)  |  Alteration (31)  |  Altered (32)  |  Back (395)  |  Brightness (12)  |  Brilliant (57)  |  Cassiopeia (2)  |  Change (639)  |  Civilization (220)  |  Common (447)  |  Component (51)  |  Constellation (18)  |  Convince (43)  |  Distance (171)  |  Double (18)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Happen (282)  |  Happened (88)  |  Heat (180)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Heavens (125)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Know (1538)  |  Life (1870)  |  Light (635)  |  Little (717)  |  Loneliness (6)  |  Look (584)  |  Looking (191)  |  Mass (160)  |  Mile (43)  |  Milky Way (29)  |  Million (124)  |  Minute (129)  |  Motion (320)  |  Nearer (45)  |  Nearness (3)  |  Neighbor (14)  |  Observation (593)  |  Observe (179)  |  Old (499)  |  Other (2233)  |  Ourselves (247)  |  Perseus (2)  |  Photograph (23)  |  Planet (402)  |  Planetary (29)  |  Power (771)  |  Radical (28)  |  Rest (287)  |  Revolution (133)  |  Set (400)  |  Shift (45)  |  Size (62)  |  Solar System (81)  |  Spectrum (35)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Sun (407)  |  Supernatural (26)  |  System (545)  |  Telescope (106)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Transport (31)  |  Transportation (19)  |  Twin (16)  |  Unfamiliar (17)  |  Unfamiliarity (5)  |  Way (1214)  |  World (1850)

What remains to be learned may indeed dwarf imagination. Nevertheless, the universe itself is closed and finite. … The uniformity of nature and the general applicability of natural laws set limits to knowledge. If there are just 100, or 105, or 110 ways in which atoms may form, then when one has identified the full range of properties of these, singly and in combination, chemical knowledge will be complete.
Presidential Address (28 Dec 1970) to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'Science: Endless Horizons or Golden Age?', Science (8 Jan 1971), 171, No. 3866, 24.
Science quotes on:  |  Atom (381)  |  Chemical (303)  |  Chemistry (376)  |  Closed (38)  |  Combination (150)  |  Complete (209)  |  Finite (60)  |  Form (976)  |  General (521)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Law (913)  |  Learn (672)  |  Learned (235)  |  Limit (294)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural Law (46)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Nevertheless (90)  |  Range (104)  |  Remain (355)  |  Set (400)  |  Uniformity (38)  |  Universe (900)  |  Way (1214)  |  Will (2350)


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
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
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 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.