Intoxication Quotes (7 quotes)
La jeunesse est une ivresse continuelle: c’est la fièvre de la raison.
Youth is continual intoxication; it is a fever of reason.
Youth is continual intoxication; it is a fever of reason.
Original French from Maximes et Réflexions Morales (1796), 40, Maxim 279. This English translation in Maxims and Moral Reflexions: An Improved Edition (1797), 126, Maxim 503.
A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
In An Essay on Criticism (Written 1709, published 1711), 14. (Written in 1709). Misquoted in The Monthly Miscellany; or Gentleman and Lady’s Complete Magazine (1774), as “Mr. Pope says, very truly, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’” This latter version of the quote has, in modern times, been misattributed to Albert Einstein.
I think every child born on this planet up to the age of about four or five is fascinated by the natural world. If they aren’t it’s because we deprive them of the opportunity. Over half the world’s population is urbanised and the thought that some children may grow up not looking at a pond or knowing how plants grow is a terrible thing. If you lose that delight and joy and intoxication, you’ve lost something hugely precious.
From interview with Alice Roberts, 'Attenborough: My Life on Earth', The Biologist (Aug 2015), 62, No. 4, 14.
In Sheldon it was not only the wild creatures [and cats] … that were sacrificed in the campaign against an insect. … Sheep [were in]… a small, untreated blue-grass pasture across a gravel road from a field which had been treated with dieldrin spray…. Evidently some spray had drifted across the road into the pasture, for the sheep began to show symptoms of intoxication almost at once…. They lost interest in food and displayed extreme restlessness, following the pasture fence around and around apparently searching for a way out… [They] bleated almost continuously, and stood with their heads lowered… [Several] sheep eventually died.
In 'Needless Havoc', Silent Spring (1962), 94.
Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.
From speech upon receiving the John Burroughs Medal (Apr 1952) in New York, awarded for her book, The Sea Around Us. As collected in Rachel Carson and Linda Lear (ed.), 'Design for Nature Writing', Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998, 2011), 94.
Several very eminent living paleontologists frequently emphasise the abruptness of some of the major changes that have occurred, and seek for an external cause. This is a heady wine and has intoxicated palaeontologists since the days when they could blame it all on Noah's flood. In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record
In The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (1973), 19-20.
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) -- 
