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: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index F > Category: Fierce

Fierce Quotes (8 quotes)

Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day of their lives.
From The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (2000), 76.
Science quotes on:  |  Activity (218)  |  Alert (13)  |  Angst (2)  |  Available (80)  |  Capacity (105)  |  Dedication (12)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Drive (61)  |  Great (1610)  |  Impulse (52)  |  Insight (107)  |  Internal (69)  |  Kind (564)  |  Lack (127)  |  Least (75)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Mentally (3)  |  Met (2)  |  Moment (260)  |  People (1031)  |  Person (366)  |  Share (82)  |  Term (357)  |  Through (846)  |  Unexpected (55)  |  Unquestioned (7)  |  Utter (8)  |  Value (393)  |  Work (1402)

As the issues are greater than men ever sought to realize before, the recriminations will be fiercer and pride more desperately hurt. It may help to recall that many recognized before the bomb ever feel that the time had already come when we must learn to live in One World.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Already (226)  |  Bomb (20)  |  Feel (371)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greater (288)  |  Help (116)  |  Hurt (14)  |  Issue (46)  |  Learn (672)  |  Live (650)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  Pride (84)  |  Realize (157)  |  Recall (11)  |  Recognize (136)  |  Seek (218)  |  Time (1911)  |  Will (2350)  |  World (1850)

Come, see the north-wind’s masonry, Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he For number or proportion.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Artificer (5)  |  Bastion (3)  |  Care (203)  |  Curve (49)  |  Door (94)  |  Evermore (2)  |  Fanciful (6)  |  Furnish (97)  |  Masonry (4)  |  Myriad (32)  |  Naught (10)  |  North Wind (2)  |  Number (710)  |  Project (77)  |  Proportion (140)  |  Quarry (14)  |  Roof (14)  |  Round (26)  |  Savage (33)  |  See (1094)  |  Speed (66)  |  Stake (20)  |  Tile (2)  |  Tree (269)  |  Unseen (23)  |  White (132)  |  Wild (96)  |  Wind (141)  |  Windward (2)  |  Work (1402)

Everything around us is filled with mystery and magic. I find this no cause for despair, no reason to turn for solace to esoteric formulae or chariots of gods. On the contrary, our inability to find easy answers fills me with a fierce pride in our ambivalent biology … with a constant sense of wonder and delight that we should be part of anything so profound.
In Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979), 14.
Science quotes on:  |  Ambivalent (2)  |  Answer (389)  |  Biology (232)  |  Cause (561)  |  Chariot (9)  |  Constant (148)  |  Contrary (143)  |  Delight (111)  |  Despair (40)  |  Easy (213)  |  Esoteric (4)  |  Everything (489)  |  Fill (67)  |  Find (1014)  |  Formula (102)  |  God (776)  |  Inability (11)  |  Magic (92)  |  Mystery (188)  |  Part (235)  |  Pride (84)  |  Profound (105)  |  Reason (766)  |  Sense (785)  |  Solace (7)  |  Turn (454)  |  Wonder (251)

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breathe in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.
In Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), 56.
Science quotes on:  |  Breathe (49)  |  Dust (68)  |  Emerge (24)  |  Eternity (64)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Face (214)  |  Flexible (7)  |  Forever (111)  |  Hear (144)  |  Know (1538)  |  Live (650)  |  Magic (92)  |  Mean (810)  |  Meaning (244)  |  Newborn (5)  |  Past (355)  |  Pattern (116)  |  Shift (45)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Will (2350)  |  Wind (141)  |  Witness (57)

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.… Mountains have a secret opinion about them.… Our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down… We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.
Science quotes on:  |  Die (94)  |  Eye (440)  |  Fire (203)  |  Green (65)  |  Howl (3)  |  Life (1870)  |  Listen (81)  |  Mountain (202)  |  Objectively (6)  |  Opinion (291)  |  Realize (157)  |  Rifle (3)  |  Secret (216)  |  Wolf (11)

That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Black And White (3)  |  Change (639)  |  Far (158)  |  Feel (371)  |  Float (31)  |  Know (1538)  |  Lie (370)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Long (778)  |  Night (133)  |  Peaceful (6)  |  Place (192)  |  Pleiades (4)  |  Raft (3)  |  Reflection (93)  |  Sky (174)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Struggle (111)  |  Sun (407)  |  Way (1214)  |  White (132)  |  Wink (3)  |  World (1850)

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)
In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1990), 65.
Science quotes on:  |  Alternative (32)  |  Beast (58)  |  Camel (12)  |  Crevasse (2)  |  Death (406)  |  Deep (241)  |  Demise (2)  |  Dog (70)  |  Dune (4)  |  Fieldwork (5)  |  Fly (153)  |  Follow (389)  |  Hundredth (2)  |  Important (229)  |  Inaccessible (18)  |  Include (93)  |  Inhabit (18)  |  Jungle (24)  |  Legend (18)  |  Locate (7)  |  Miasma (2)  |  Model (106)  |  Native (41)  |  Putrefaction (4)  |  Restless (13)  |  Site (19)  |  Sled (2)  |  Surround (33)  |  Swarm (15)


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.