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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index L > Category: Listening

Listening Quotes (26 quotes)

’Tis the witching hour of night,
Orbed is the moon and bright.
And the stars they glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen-
For what listen they?
From poem 'Prophecy', collected in The Complete Works of John Keats (1818). Vol. 2, 239.
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[I doubt that in today's world, I and Francis Crick would ever have had our Eureka moment.] I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.
(Response when asked how he thought the climate of scientific research had changed since he made his discovery of the structure of life in 1953.)
Quoted by Tim Adams in 'The New Age of Ignorance', The Observer (30 Jun 2007).
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A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain—the medial orbito-frontal cortex—like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music. … Neuroscience can’t tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved; you can find beauty in anything.
As quoted in James Gallagher, 'Mathematics: Why The Brain Sees Maths As Beauty,' BBC News (13 Feb 2014), on bbc.co.uk web site.
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An underwater-listening device, the “hydrophone,” has, in recent years, shown that sea creatures click, grunt, snap, moan, and, in general, make the ocean depths as maddeningly noisy as ever the land is.
(1965). In Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 188.
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Before the printing press, the young learned by listening, watching, doing.
In 'Classroom Without Walls', Explorations (May 1957), No. 7. Collected in Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (eds.), Explorations in Communication, an Anthology (1960), 1.
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Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity.
This last paper contains no references and quotes no authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist’s. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.
In Variety of Men (1966), 100-101. First published in Commentary magazine.
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Hold fast to dreams,
Let them stay with you forever.
Don’t let them die.
You might fly up in the sky
On a silver unicorn’s back,
Dreaming of the ocean,
Listening to the dolphins sing.
Dreams, hold on to them forever.
…...
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I have been especially fortunate for about 50 years in having two memory banks available—whenever I can't remember something I ask my wife, and thus I am able to draw on this auxiliary memory bank. Moreover, there is a second way In which I get ideas ... I listen carefully to what my wife says, and in this way I often get a good idea. I recommend to ... young people ... that you make a permanent acquisition of an auxiliary memory bank that you can become familiar with and draw upon throughout your lives.
T. Goertzel and B. Goertzel, Linus Pauling (1995), 240.
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I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.
Nobel Lecture (12 Dec 1967). In Nobel Lectures: Physiology Or Medicine: (1999), Vol. 4 (1963-197), 292.
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If the words of a wise man are few, they are nevertheless worth listening to.
Aphorism as given by the fictional character Dezhnev Senior, in Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987), 242.
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If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities.
From 'On the Method of Theoretical Physics', in Essays in Science (1934, 2004), 12.
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If you want to hear, you must begin by listening.
Aphorism as given by the fictional character Dezhnev Senior, in Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987), 238.
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It was shortly after midday on December 12, 1901, [in a hut on the cliffs at St. John’s, Newfoundland] that I placed a single earphone to my ear and started listening. The receiver on the table before me was very crude—a few coils and condensers and a coherer—no valves [vacuum tubes], no amplifiers, not even a crystal. I was at last on the point of putting the correctness of all my beliefs to test. … [The] answer came at 12:30. … Suddenly, about half past twelve there sounded the sharp click of the “tapper” … Unmistakably, the three sharp clicks corresponding to three dots sounded in my ear. “Can you hear anything, Mr. Kemp?” I asked, handing the telephone to my assistant. Kemp heard the same thing as I. … I knew then that I had been absolutely right in my calculations. The electric waves which were being sent out from Poldhu [Cornwall, England] had travelled the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the earth which so many doubters considered a fatal obstacle. … I knew that the day on which I should be able to send full messages without wires or cables across the Atlantic was not far distant.
As quoted in Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi (2000), 93.
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It was the method which attracted me [to physics]—the experimental method, which was born with physics, and is now universal in science. It’s asking a question of nature, and listening for the answer from nature … the way in which you’re going about asking the question and detecting the answer. And in my view it’s this kind of method that attracts me.
From 'Asking Nature', collected in Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards (eds.), Passionate Minds: The Inner World of Scientists (1997), 197.
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Most people regard scientists as explorers … Imagine a handful of people shipwrecked on a strange island and setting out to explore it. One of them cuts a solitary path through the jungle, going on and on until he is exhausted or lost or both. He eventually returns to his companions, and they listen to him with goggling eyes as he describes what he saw; what he fell into, and what bit him. After a rest he demands more supplies and sets off again to explore the unknown. Many of his companions will be doing the same, each choosing his own direction and pursuing his pioneering path.
In The Development of Design (1981), 1.
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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1980), 154.
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People do more talking than listening: under the law of gravity, it takes more energy to shut one's mouth than to open it.
Anonymous
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 267.
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Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
In The Use of Life (1895), 66.
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Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society.
In Education For a New World (1946), 4.
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The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society–and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.
In magazine article, 'Is Anybody Listening?', Fortune magazine (Sep 1950), 174.
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The social system that is necessary for learning and transmission of culture depends upon properties of the brain and endocrine system that reduce aggression, impose restraint and allow cooperation. Five hundred apes would not sit quietly and listen to another ape like the audience at this meeting.
From introductory remarks when opening a joint meeting of the British Academy and the Royal Society at the Wellcome Institute. Printed in 'The Emergence of Man', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences (May 8, 1981), 292, No. 1057, 5.
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To try to make a model of an atom by studying its spectrum is like trying to make a model of a grand piano by listening to the noise it makes when thrown downstairs.
Anonymous
In Oliver Lodge in Atoms and Rays (1924), 74.
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Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
…...
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What is it to see, in an Eagle glide
Which fills a human heart with so much pride?
Is it that it soars effortless above the Earth
That steals us from our own limits & dearth?
Trapped in our seas of befuddling sludge
We try and try but cannot budge.
And then to see a mortal; with such ease take wing
Up in a breeze that makes our failing spirits sing?
Do we, vicarious birds, search in it our childishness -
When we too were young & yearned in heart to fly?
Taking flights of fancy through adolescent nights
Listening little, heeding less, knowing not why?
From its highest perch in the forest of snow
Majestic - the Eagle soars alone.
Riding thermals, lording clouds
Till dropping silent from the sky as a stone
But we, so quick and ready to fold
Give up our wings at the whiff of age
Losing years, cursing time, wasting spirit
Living out entire lives in futile rage!
…...
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When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts. When their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguishable star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite.
The Listeners (1968, 1972), 12.
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You can’t have a big ego and be a great inventor. You constantly have to be listening and evaluating.
Quoted in Timothy L. O’Brien, 'Not Invented here: Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?', New York Times (13 Nov 2005), B6.
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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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Carl Gauss
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- 90 -
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Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
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Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
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- 70 -
Samuel Morse
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Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
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Thomas Edison
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Theodore Roosevelt
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- 60 -
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Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
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William Shakespeare
- 50 -
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Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
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JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
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- 30 -
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Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
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Benjamin Franklin
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- 20 -
Carl Sagan
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- 10 -
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