Gross Quotes (7 quotes)
All the events which occur upon the earth result from Law: even those actions which are entirely dependent on the caprices of the memory, or the impulse of the passions, are shown by statistics to be, when taken in the gross, entirely independent of the human will. As a single atom, man is an enigma; as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent; as a species, the offspring of necessity.
In The Martyrdom of Man (1876), 185-186.
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the ‘eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward’?
As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981).From a paper published in Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Building, a book sponsored by the Board of Lady Managers of the Commission that planned the 1893 World's Columbian Expositio
Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?
Letter (14 Aug 1853) to Louise Colet. As quote and cited in Robert A. Nowlan, Masters of Mathematics: The Problems They Solved, Why These Are Important, and What You Should Know about Them (2017), 271.
The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.
As quoted in Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, First on the Moon: The Astronauts’ Own Story (1970), 99.
Thus science strips off, one after the other, the more or less gross materialisations by which we endeavour to form an objective image of the soul, till men of science, speculating, in their non-scientific intervals, like other men on what science may possibly lead to, have prophesied that we shall soon have to confess that the soul is nothing else than a function of certain complex material systems.
Review of B. Stewart and P. G. Tait's book on Paradoxical Philosophy, in Nature, 19, 1878. In W. D. Niven (ed.), The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890), Vol. 2, 760.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
Pensées d'un Biologiste (1939). Translated in The Substance of Man (1962), Chap. 7.
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) -- 
