Biographies Quotes - Page 9

• I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

  Charles Babbage

  Writing, Ambition, Mean

  Charles Babbage (2013). “On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.

  Jonas Salk

  Ambition, Science, Thinking

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• The history of men of science has one peculiar advantage, as it shows the importance of little things in producing great results. Smeaton learned his principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a cyclinder ... and Newton, turning an old box into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sundial, are examples of those habits of patient observation which scientific biography attractively recommends.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Science, Men, Curves

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• [Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.

  Edward Teller

  Science, Discovery, Challenges

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• I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge-adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

  Louis Agassiz

  God, Knowledge, Science

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• During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.

  Charles Darwin

  Determination, Book, Science

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• ...I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt, Sydney Smith (1985). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1847-1850”, p.128, Cambridge University Press

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• I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age-& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs-cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:-whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge.

  Edward Lear

  Knowledge, Science, Cutting

  L. Candace Pezzera, Edward Lear, Rhode Island School of Design. Museum of Art (1982). “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear: watercolors by Edward Lear from Rhode Island collections”

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• I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!

  Richard Goldschmidt

  Knowledge, Exercise, Science

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• The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Facts, Moral

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.362, Princeton University Press

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• [Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] ... Fourier's great mathematical poem.

  Lord Kelvin

  Science, Heat, Theory

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• I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.

  Steven Chu

  Sports, Adventure, Science

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• The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

  Francis Darwin

  Strong, Book, Holiday

  Sir Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin (1925). “The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter”

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• It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.

  Albert Einstein

  Character, Fate, Science

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.35, Open Road Media

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• At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer's lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.

  Robert Bunsen

  Determination, Stars, Sleep

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• I had fallen in love with a young man... and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Science, Men, Discovery

  "Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants". Book by Susan A. Ambrose, Barbara B. Lazarus and Indira Nair, 1997.

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• Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches

  Georges Cuvier

  Science, Discovery, Blood

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• If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Nature, Science, Years

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• A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Giving, Mathematics

  Howard Baer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Alexander Belyaev (2003). “Proceedings of the Dirac Centennial Symposium: Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA, 6-7 December 2002”, p.45, World Scientific

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• Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Records, Able

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays ...”, p.7

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• Christianity was neither original nor unique, but that the roots of much of the Judeo/ Christian tradition lay in the prevailing Kamite (ancient Egyptian) culture of the region. We are faced with the inescapable realization that if Jesus had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously.

  Gerald Massey

  Christian, Jesus, Unique

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• There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

  Arthur Wing Pinero

  Legacy, Trouble, Early Life

  Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1917). “The Social Plays of Arthur Wing Pinero”

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• One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Writing, Like You, Gravestone

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• We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men.

  Hans Zinsser

  Writing, Fate, Men

  Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.6, Transaction Publishers

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• ...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.

  Samuel Johnson

  Religious, Science, Men

  Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt (1854). “Johnson's Lives of the British Poets”, p.205

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