Profane Quotes (6 quotes)
A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory.
Lecture at a teaching laboratory on Penikese Island, Buzzard's Bay. Quoted from the lecture notes by David Starr Jordan, Science Sketches (1911), 147.
I find more sure marks of the authenticity of the Bible than in any profane history whatever.
As written by Bishop Richard Watson, this anecdote was relayed to him by his former teacher, Dr. Robert Smith, late Master of Trinity College, who was told by Newton, while he was writing his Observations on Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. Quoted in Richard Watson, 'An Apology For Christianity', Bishop of Landaff’s Sermons on Public Occasions, and Tracts on Religious Subjects (1788), 286. At the time of publication, the author was Lord Bishop of Landaff and Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge. 'Apology' was one in a series of Letters addressed to Ed. Gibbon, Esq (author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire first printed in 1776). Dr. Robert Smith (1689-2 Feb 1768) was a mathematician who helped to spread Isaac Newton’s ideas in Europe.
It is still believed, apparently, that there is some thing mysteriously laudable about achieving viable offspring. I have searched the sacred and profane scriptures, for many years, but have yet to find any ground for this notion. To have a child is no more creditable than to have rheumatism–and no more discreditable. Ethically, it is absolutely meaningless. And practically, it is mainly a matter of chance.
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No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
The phosphorous smell which is developed when electricity (to speak the profane language) is passing from the points of a conductor into air, or when lightning happens to fall upon some terrestrial object, or when water is electrolysed, has been engaging my attention the last couple of years, and induced me to make many attempts at clearing up that mysterious phenomenon. Though baffled for a long time, at last, I think, I have succeeded so far as to have got the clue which will lead to the discovery of the true cause of the smell in question.
[His first reference to investigating ozone, for which he is remembered.]
[His first reference to investigating ozone, for which he is remembered.]
Letter to Michael Faraday (4 Apr 1840), The Letters of Faraday and Schoenbein, 1836-1862 (1899), 73. This letter was communicated to the Royal Society on 7 May, and an abstract published in the Philosophical Magazine.
The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia is the slow inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken.
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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) -- 
