Last Word Quotes (10 quotes)
Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense.
What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.
Commonly said to be his last words. However, different true last words are stated by Augustus De Morgan.
What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.
Commonly said to be his last words. However, different true last words are stated by Augustus De Morgan.
Quoted in Augustus De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes (1915), Vol. 2, 3.
L’homme ne poursuit que des chimères.
Man follows only phantoms.
Man follows only phantoms.
His true last words, according to De Morgan. As quoted in Augustus De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes (1915), Vol. 2, 3.
In science, attempts at formulating hierarchies are always doomed to eventual failure. A Newton will always be followed by an Einstein, a Stahl by a Lavoisier; and who can say who will come after us? What the human mind has fabricated must be subject to all the changes—which are not progress—that the human mind must undergo. The 'last words' of the sciences are often replaced, more often forgotten. Science is a relentlessly dialectical process, though it suffers continuously under the necessary relativation of equally indispensable absolutes. It is, however, possible that the ever-growing intellectual and moral pollution of our scientific atmosphere will bring this process to a standstill. The immense library of ancient Alexandria was both symptom and cause of the ossification of the Greek intellect. Even now I know of some who feel that we know too much about the wrong things.
Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science (1979), 46.
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.
In 'Philosophy, Religion, and So Forth', A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989), 12.
Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O’Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 237.
Science, especially natural and medical science, is always undergoing evolution, and one can never hope to have said the last word upon any branch of it.
From Introduction to Alphonse Laveran and Felix Etienne Pierre Mesnil Trypanosomes and Trypanosomiasis (1904). English edition translated and much enlarged by David Nabarro, (1907), xvii.
THE DYING AIRMAN
A handsome young airman lay dying,
As on the aerodrome he lay,
To the mechanics who round him came sighing,
These last words he did say.
“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
The connecting-rod out of my brain,
Take the cam-shaft from out of my backbone,
And assemble the engine again.”
A handsome young airman lay dying,
As on the aerodrome he lay,
To the mechanics who round him came sighing,
These last words he did say.
“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
The connecting-rod out of my brain,
Take the cam-shaft from out of my backbone,
And assemble the engine again.”
From Edith L. Tiempo, Introduction to Poetry: Poetry Through Image and Statement (1993), 6.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
From 'Conservation' (c.1938), Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1953), 141. Collected in The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries (1999), 142.
To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
From The Hope of Progress (1973), 137. Medawar defends science against the attacks of critics who claim that science cannot enrich our lives.
Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word.
Address at the Inauguration of the Pasteur Institute. In René Vallery-Radot, The Life of Pasteur, translated by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire (1919), 443.
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) -- 
