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Who said: “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index L > Category: Limitless

Limitless Quotes (14 quotes)

… just as the astronomer, the physicist, the geologist, or other student of objective science looks about in the world of sense, so, not metaphorically speaking but literally, the mind of the mathematician goes forth in the universe of logic in quest of the things that are there; exploring the heights and depths for facts—ideas, classes, relationships, implications, and the rest; observing the minute and elusive with the powerful microscope of his Infinitesimal Analysis; observing the elusive and vast with the limitless telescope of his Calculus of the Infinite; making guesses regarding the order and internal harmony of the data observed and collocated; testing the hypotheses, not merely by the complete induction peculiar to mathematics, but, like his colleagues of the outer world, resorting also to experimental tests and incomplete induction; frequently finding it necessary, in view of unforeseen disclosures, to abandon one hopeful hypothesis or to transform it by retrenchment or by enlargement:—thus, in his own domain, matching, point for point, the processes, methods and experience familiar to the devotee of natural science.
In Lectures on Science, Philosophy and Art (1908), 26
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Compare the length of a moment with the period of ten thousand years; the first, however minuscule, does exist as a fraction of a second. But that number of years, or any multiple of it that you may name, cannot even be compared with a limitless extent of time, the reason being that comparisons can be drawn between finite things, but not between finite and infinite.
The Consolation of Philosophy [before 524], Book II, trans. P. G. Walsh (1999), 36.
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Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician’s hand were holding you aloft?
From 'La Peau de Chagrin' (1831). As translated by Herbert J. Hunt in The Wild Ass’s Skin (1977), 40-41.
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Have you ever plunged into the immensity of time and space by reading the geological tracts of Cuvier? Transported by his genius, have you hovered over the limitless abyss of the past, as if held aloft by a magician’s hand?
From 'La Peau de Chagrin' (1831). As translated as by Helen Constantine The Wild Ass’s Skin (2012), 19.
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It’s not for glory that Soviet cosmonauts are in this assault on the cosmos; they are motivated by a limitless love for and devotion to their country, the Party and the people, and by a desire to help Soviet scientists to discover the secrets of the universe.
In First Man in Space: The Life and Achievement of Yuri Gagarin: a Collection (1984), 104. Cited as written as a foreword of a book at the request of the author.
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Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe.
…...
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Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer’s gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness of life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence.
From Commemoration Day Address (22 Feb 1877) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, collected in The Collected Mathematical Papers: (1870-1883) (1909), 77-78.
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Our knowledge must always be limited, but the knowable is limitless. The greater the sphere of our knowledge the greater the surface of contact with our infinite ignorance.
Conclusion of the James Forrest Lecture (3 May 1894) at an Extra Meeting of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 'The Relation of Mathematics to Engineering', collected in Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1894), 347.
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The generalizations of science sweep on in ever-widening circles, and more aspiring flights, through a limitless creation.
In 'The Darwinian Hypothesis: Darwin on the Origin of Species', Man's Place in Nature and Other Essays (1910), 337.
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The greatest spiritual revolutionary Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.
In The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis (1967), 1207.
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The universe is then one, infinite, immobile. ... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.
In Giordano Bruno and Jack Lindsay, 'Fifth Dialogue', Cause, Principle, and Unity: Five Dialogues (1976), 135.
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There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
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We call this planet Earth, yet this is the only planet that has a sea. I think we should have called it “sea”, of course, but the naming is already done.
From 'Remarks Delivered at Symposium', after Ray’s paper, 'The Scientific Need for Shallow-Water Marine Sanctuaries,' collected as Article VI, in Julia Allen Field and Henry Field (eds.), Scientific Use of Natural Areas: Symposium (1965), 92. The Symposium was the XVI International Congress of Zoology, Washington (Aug 1963). Arthur C. Clarke is attributed by James Lovelock, with a similar quote using the name “Ocean” in place of “sea”.
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We still view the sea as a limitless wilderness, which of course, it is not. We view the sea apart from the earth.
From 'Remarks Delivered at Symposium', after Ray’s paper, 'The Scientific Need for Shallow-Water Marine Sanctuaries,' collected as Article VI, in Julia Allen Field and Henry Field (eds.), Scientific Use of Natural Areas: Symposium (1965), 92. The Symposium was the XVI International Congress of Zoology, Washington (Aug 1963). Ray’s remark continues with, “We call this planet Earth…” quoted separately on this web page.
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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
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Sophie Germain
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Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
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Carl Gauss
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- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
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Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
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- 80 -
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- 70 -
Samuel Morse
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- 60 -
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- 50 -
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- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
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- 30 -
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- 20 -
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- 10 -
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