Goddess Quotes (9 quotes)
Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.
Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.
'The Human Form Divine', in The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (1956), 86.
He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.
The Hot Zone
I recognize that to view the Earth as if it were alive is just a convenient, but different, way of organizing the facts of the Earth. I am, of course, prejudiced in favour of Gaia and have filled my life for the past 25 years with the thought that the Earth might be in certain ways be alive—not as the ancients saw her, a sentient goddess with purpose and foresight—more like a tree. A tree that exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrients to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly that, to me, the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.
In Healing Gaia: Practical Medicine for the Planet (1991), 12.
If in Germany the goddess Justitia had not the unfortunate habit of depositing the ministerial portfolios only in the cradles of her own progeny, who knows how many a German mathematician might not also have made an excellent minister.
In Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung, Bd. 13 (1904), 372.
The goddess of learning is fabled to have sprung full-grown from the brain of Zeus, but it is seldom that a scientific conception is born in its final form, or owns a single parent. More often it is the product of a series of minds, each in turn modifying the ideas of those that came before, and providing material for those that came after. The electron is no exception.
'Electronic Waves', Nobel Lecture (7 Jun 1938). Nobel Lectures: Physics 1922-1941 (1998), 397.
The idea that the Earth is alive may be as old as humankind. The ancient Greeks gave her the powerful name Gaia and looked on her as a goddess.
In 'The Earth as a Living Organism', Essay collected in E. O. Wilson and F. M. Peter (eds.), Biodiversity (1988), Chap. 56, 488. [Lovelock gave the name Gaia to Earth’s self-regulation of its own material conditions and requirements akin to a living organism. —Webmaster
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...
His second motto (from King Lear by Shakespeare).
To Archimedes once came a youth intent upon knowledge.
Said he “Initiate me into the Science divine,
Which to our country has borne glorious fruits in abundance,
And which the walls of the town ’gainst the Sambuca protects.”
“Callst thou the science divine? It is so,” the wise man responded;
“But so it was, my son, ere the state by her service was blest.
Would’st thou have fruit of her only? Mortals with that can provide thee,
He who the goddess would woo, seek not the woman in her.”
Said he “Initiate me into the Science divine,
Which to our country has borne glorious fruits in abundance,
And which the walls of the town ’gainst the Sambuca protects.”
“Callst thou the science divine? It is so,” the wise man responded;
“But so it was, my son, ere the state by her service was blest.
Would’st thou have fruit of her only? Mortals with that can provide thee,
He who the goddess would woo, seek not the woman in her.”
Poem, 'Archimedes und der Schuler', collected in Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller (1807), Vol. 1, 149. English version 'Archimedes and the Student', in Edgar A. Bowring (trans.), The Poems of Schiller (1875), 262-263. From the original German: Zu Archimedes kam einst ein wissbegieriger Jüngling. / “Weihe mich,” sprach er zu ihm, “ein in die gottliche Kunst, / Die so herrliche Frucht dem Vaterlande getragen, / Und die Mauern der Stadt vor der Sambuca beschützt!” / “Gottlieb nennst du die Kunst? Sie ists,” versetzte der Weise; / “Aber das war sie, mein Sohn, eh sie dem Staat noch gedient. / Willst du nur Früchte von ihr, die kann auch die Sterbliche zeugen; / Wer um die Göttin freit, suche in ihr nicht das Weib.” [Note: “Sambuca” is the name of a machine used in sieges, employed by Marcellus against Syracuse.]
To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.
From Xenien (1796). As quoted in Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1979), 38. From the original German, “Einem ist sie [Wissenschaft; die hohe, die himmlische Göttin; dem anderen, Eine tüchige Kuh, die ihn mit Butter versorgt,” as given in Alan Lindsay Mackay, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991), 218.
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) -- 
