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: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index W > Category: Wretched

Wretched Quotes (8 quotes)

All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.
Frankenstein (1818, 1823), Vol. 1, 205.
Science quotes on:  |  Annihilation (15)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Bound (120)  |  Creator (97)  |  Creature (242)  |  Hate (68)  |  Hatred (21)  |  Living (492)  |  Must (1525)  |  Spurn (2)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Tie (42)

An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.
[Closing remark in an address, referring to himself.]
In 'The Prefactory Oration' (address to the University of Cambridge upon being elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, 14 Mar 1664). In Mathematical Lectures (1734), Preface, xxxii.
Science quotes on:  |  Himself (461)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Most (1728)  |  Orator (3)

Disease is largely a removable evil. It continues to afflict humanity, not only because of incomplete knowledge of its causes and lack of individual and public hygiene, but also because it is extensively fostered by harsh economic and industrial conditions and by wretched housing in congested communities. ... The reduction of the death rate is the principal statistical expression and index of human social progress. It means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable. (1911)
Quoted in Evelynn Maxine Hammonds, Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930(1999), 221.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Affliction (6)  |  Age (509)  |  Cause (561)  |  Citizen (52)  |  Community (111)  |  Condition (362)  |  Congestion (2)  |  Continue (179)  |  Death (406)  |  Disease (340)  |  Economic (84)  |  Economy (59)  |  Effort (243)  |  Evil (122)  |  Expression (181)  |  Extension (60)  |  Foster (12)  |  Health (210)  |  Human (1512)  |  Humanity (186)  |  Hygiene (13)  |  Incomplete (31)  |  Incompleteness (2)  |  Individual (420)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lack (127)  |  Live (650)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Misery (31)  |  Old (499)  |  Old Age (35)  |  Period (200)  |  Prevention (37)  |  Principal (69)  |  Progress (492)  |  Public Health (12)  |  Reduction (52)  |  Social (261)  |  Social Progress (3)  |  Suffering (68)  |  Thousand (340)

If you could see what I almost daily see in my practice … persons … in the very last stages of wretched existence, emaciated to a skeleton, with both tables of the skull almost completely perforated in many places, half the nose gone, with rotten jaws, ulerated throats, breaths most pestiferous more intolerable than poisonous upas, limbs racked with the pains of the Inquisition, minds as imbecile as the puling babe, a grievous burden to themselves and a disgusting spectacle to others, you would exclaim as I have often done, 'O! the lamentable want of science that dictates the abuse (use) of that noxious drug calomel!'
[Calomel is the mercury compound, Hg2Cl2.]
Quoted in Wooster Beach, A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Health (1848), 177.
Science quotes on:  |  Abuse (25)  |  Both (496)  |  Breath (61)  |  Completely (137)  |  Compound (117)  |  Daily (91)  |  Drug (61)  |  Emaciated (2)  |  Exclaim (15)  |  Existence (481)  |  Inquisition (9)  |  Lamentable (5)  |  Last (425)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Mercury (54)  |  Mind (1377)  |  More (2558)  |  Most (1728)  |  Noxious (8)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pain (144)  |  Person (366)  |  Poison (46)  |  Practice (212)  |  See (1094)  |  Skeleton (25)  |  Spectacle (35)  |  Stage (152)  |  Table (105)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Use (771)  |  Want (504)

In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, “Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.” Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, “By studying the masters, not the pupils.”
The Queen of the Sciences (1931, 1938), 10.
Science quotes on:  |  Niels Henrik Abel (15)  |  Accomplishment (102)  |  Ask (420)  |  Century (319)  |  Enough (341)  |  Exaggeration (16)  |  Charles Hermite (10)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Life (1870)  |  Master (182)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Order (638)  |  Pupil (62)  |  Say (989)  |  Study (701)  |  Studying (70)  |  Year (963)

Let him who so wishes take pleasure in boring us with all the wonders of nature: let one spend his life observing insects, another counting the tiny bones in the hearing membrane of certain fish, even in measuring, if you will, how far a flea can jump, not to mention so many other wretched objects of study; for myself, who am curious only about philosophy, who am sorry only not to be able to extend its horizons, active nature will always be my sole point of view; I love to see it from afar, in its breadth and its entirety, and not in specifics or in little details, which, although to some extent necessary in all the sciences, are generally the mark of little genius among those who devote themselves to them.
'L'Homme Plante', in Oeuvres Philosophiques de La Mettrie (1796), Vol. 2, 70-1. Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, edited by Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 377.
Science quotes on:  |  Active (80)  |  Bone (101)  |  Boring (7)  |  Breadth (15)  |  Certain (557)  |  Counting (26)  |  Curious (95)  |  Detail (150)  |  Ear (69)  |  Entirety (6)  |  Extend (129)  |  Extent (142)  |  Fish (130)  |  Flea (11)  |  Genius (301)  |  Hearing (50)  |  Horizon (47)  |  Insect (89)  |  Jump (31)  |  Life (1870)  |  Little (717)  |  Love (328)  |  Measurement (178)  |  Membrane (21)  |  Mention (84)  |  Myself (211)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Object (438)  |  Observation (593)  |  Other (2233)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Pleasure (191)  |  Point (584)  |  Point Of View (85)  |  See (1094)  |  Sole (50)  |  Sorry (31)  |  Specific (98)  |  Spend (97)  |  Study (701)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Tiny (74)  |  View (496)  |  Will (2350)  |  Wonder (251)

May the Gods confound that man who first disclosed the hours, and who first, in fact, erected a sun-dial here; who, for wretched me, minced the day up into pieces. For when I was a boy, this stomach was the sun-dial, one much better and truer than all of these; when that used to warn me to eat. Except when there was nothing to eat. Now, even when there is something to eat, it’s not eaten, unless the sun chooses; and to such a degree now, in fact, is the city filled with sun-dials, that the greater part of the people are creeping along the streets shrunk up with famine.
Plautus
A fragment, preserved in the works of Aulus Gellius, as translated by Henry Thomas Riley, in The Comedies of Plautus (1890), Vol. 2, 517.
Science quotes on:  |  Better (493)  |  Boy (100)  |  Choose (116)  |  City (87)  |  Confound (21)  |  Day (43)  |  Degree (277)  |  Dial (9)  |  Eat (108)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Famine (18)  |  First (1302)  |  God (776)  |  Greater (288)  |  Hour (192)  |  Man (2252)  |  Measurement (178)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  People (1031)  |  Something (718)  |  Stomach (40)  |  Sun (407)  |  Sundial (6)  |  Time (1911)

Nothing is more detestable to the physical anthropologist than... [the] wretched habit of cremating the dead. It involves not only a prodigal waste of costly fuel and excellent fertilizer, but also the complete destruction of physical historical data. On the other hand, the custom of embalming and mummification is most praiseworthy and highly to be recommended.
Up From the Ape (1931), 531.
Science quotes on:  |  Anthropology (61)  |  Complete (209)  |  Cremation (2)  |  Custom (44)  |  Data (162)  |  Destruction (135)  |  Embalming (2)  |  Fertilizer (13)  |  Habit (174)  |  Historical (70)  |  Involve (93)  |  More (2558)  |  Most (1728)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Other (2233)  |  Physical (518)  |  Recommend (27)  |  Waste (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.