TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Environmental extremists ... wouldn�t let you build a house unless it looked like a bird�s nest.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Steep

Steep Quotes (7 quotes)

High office is like a steep crag that is reached only by eagles and reptiles.
In 'Éloge de l’Abbé de Choisy', collected in Éloges Lus Dans Les Séances Publiques de l'Académie Françoise (1779), 309-310. From the original French, “les grandes places sont comme les rochers escarpés, qu'il n'y a que les aigles & les reptiles qui y parviennent.” As translated above by Webmaster. Using “high office” for “les grandes places” (more literally, “great places” or “grand seats”) is based on the context of the whole paragraph containing the quote. Elsewhere on the web, the quote is found more freely translated as “High office, is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit—reptiles and eagles.” Webmaster thinks that eagles and reptiles scaling a “steep crag” makes a better mental picture than a “pyramid.”
Science quotes on:  |  Cliff (22)  |  Crag (6)  |  Eagle (20)  |  Reach (286)  |  Reptile (33)

In fact, almost everything in this isle [Ireland] confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland had been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling.
Bede
Science quotes on:  |  Bite (18)  |  Book (413)  |  Drunk (10)  |  Everything (489)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Immunity (8)  |  Ireland (8)  |  Poison (46)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Remedy (63)  |  Snake (29)  |  Suffering (68)  |  Swelling (5)  |  Water (503)

Standing now in diffused light, with the wind at my back, I experience suddenly a feeling of completeness–not a feeling of having achieved something or of being stronger than everyone who was ever here before, not a feeling of having arrived at the ultimate point, not a feeling of supremacy. Just a breath of happiness deep inside my mind and my breast. The summit seemed suddenly to me to be a refuge, and I had not expected to find any refuge up here. Looking at the steep, sharp ridges below us, I have the impression that to have come later would have been too late. Everything we now say to one another, we only say out of embarrassment. I don’t think anymore. As I pull the tape recorder, trancelike, from my rucksack, and switch it on wanting to record a few appropriate phrases, tears again well into my eyes. “Now we are on the summit of Everest,” I begin, “it is so cold that we cannot take photographs…” I cannot go on, I am immediately shaken with sobs. I can neither talk nor think, feeling only how this momentous experience changes everything. To reach only a few meters below the summit would have required the same amount of effort, the same anxiety and burden of sorrow, but a feeling like this, an eruption of feeling, is only possible on the summit itself.
In Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate (1979), 180.
Science quotes on:  |  Achieve (75)  |  Amount (153)  |  Anxiety (30)  |  Anymore (5)  |  Appropriate (61)  |  Arrive (40)  |  Back (395)  |  Begin (275)  |  Being (1276)  |  Below (26)  |  Breast (9)  |  Breath (61)  |  Burden (30)  |  Change (639)  |  Cold (115)  |  Completeness (19)  |  Deep (241)  |  Diffuse (5)  |  Effort (243)  |  Embarrassment (5)  |  Eruption (10)  |  Everest (10)  |  Everyone (35)  |  Everything (489)  |  Expect (203)  |  Experience (494)  |  Eye (440)  |  Feel (371)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Find (1014)  |  Happiness (126)  |  Immediately (115)  |  Impression (118)  |  Inside (30)  |  Late (119)  |  Light (635)  |  Looking (191)  |  Meter (9)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Momentous (7)  |  Photograph (23)  |  Phrase (61)  |  Point (584)  |  Possible (560)  |  Pull (43)  |  Reach (286)  |  Record (161)  |  Recorder (5)  |  Refuge (15)  |  Require (229)  |  Required (108)  |  Ridge (9)  |  Rucksack (3)  |  Same (166)  |  Say (989)  |  Seem (150)  |  Shake (43)  |  Sharp (17)  |  Something (718)  |  Sorrow (21)  |  Stand (284)  |  Strong (182)  |  Stronger (36)  |  Suddenly (91)  |  Summit (27)  |  Supremacy (4)  |  Switch (10)  |  Talk (108)  |  Tape (5)  |  Tear (48)  |  Think (1122)  |  Ultimate (152)  |  Want (504)  |  Wind (141)

The ruins of Machu Picchu are perched on top of a steep ridge in the most inaccessible corner of the most inaccessible section of the central Andes. No part of the highlands of Peru has been better defended by natural bulwarks—a stupendous canyon whose rim is more than a mile above the river, whose rock is granite, and whose precipices are frequently a thousand feet sheer.
As quoted in Mark Collins Jenkins (ed.), National Geographic 125 Years: Legendary Photographs, Adventures, and Discoveries (2012), 70, citing Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas (1930).
Science quotes on:  |  Andes (2)  |  Better (493)  |  Canyon (9)  |  Central (81)  |  Corner (59)  |  Foot (65)  |  Granite (8)  |  Highland (2)  |  Inaccessible (18)  |  Mile (43)  |  More (2558)  |  Most (1728)  |  Natural (810)  |  Perch (7)  |  Peru (3)  |  Precipice (3)  |  Ridge (9)  |  River (140)  |  Rock (176)  |  Ruin (44)  |  Sheer (9)  |  Stupendous (13)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Top (100)

The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; … I believe that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place by her agency.
From lecture, 'On Zoology', delivered at The South Kensington Museum (14 May 1860), published as a 16-page pamphlet, Lectures Addressed to Teachers: Lecture IV (1869), 14. Also known in later collections by the title, 'A Lobster; or, The Study of Zoology', for example, in Twelve Lectures and Essays (1908), 128.
Science quotes on:  |  Intellectual Revolution (4)  |  Modern Thought (4)

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Karl Marx
Preface to the French Edition, Das Capital (1872). In Karl Marx, Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production, translated from the 3rd German edition by S. Moore and E. Aveling (1967), 21.
Science quotes on:  |  Chance (244)  |  Climb (39)  |  Do (1905)  |  Dread (13)  |  Gaining (2)  |  Luminous (19)  |  Path (159)  |  Road (71)  |  Royal (56)  |  Summit (27)

There is one best path to the mountain crest; yet there are other paths, nearly as good. Let Youth be assured that the steeps of success have as many paths as there are stout-hearted climbers.
From chapter 'Jottings from a Note-book', in Canadian Stories (1918), 173-174.
Science quotes on:  |  Assured (4)  |  Best (467)  |  Climber (7)  |  Crest (2)  |  Good (906)  |  Heart (243)  |  Mountain (202)  |  Nearly (137)  |  Other (2233)  |  Path (159)  |  Success (327)  |  Youth (109)


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
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.