Natural Phenomena Quotes - Page 2

• I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists.

  Hermann von Helmholtz

  Law, Differences, Ease

  Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.96, University of Chicago Press

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• When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Drama, Writing, Trying

  Letter to E. Hoffman Price (29 September 1933), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 579), 1996.

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• The artist's imagination may wander far from nature. But as long as it is a living, moving power in his brain, isn't it just as real as any other natural phenomenon? The artist justifies his existence only when he can transform his imagination into truth.

  Bill Vaughan

  Real, Moving, Artist

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• There is no natural phenomenon that is comparable with the sudden and apparently accidentally timed development of science, except perhaps the condensation of a super-saturated gas or the explosion of some unpredictable explosives.

  Eugene Wigner

  Development, Natural, Explosions

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• Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon - as say, a lettuce leaf. By 'happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

  Lee Krasner

  Mean, Men, Painting

  Robert Carleton Hobbs, Lee Krasner (1993). “Lee Krasner”, Abbeville Press

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• England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists.

  William Crookes

  Food, Science, Discovery

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• It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute the latter I collected many proofs, but I do not publish them ... I would dare to publish my speculations if there were people men like you.

  Galileo Galilei

  Science, Men, Light

  Letter to Johannes Kepler, 1596.

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• All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.

  William Ralph Inge

  Spiritual, World, Recognition

  William Ralph Inge (1910). “Faith and Its Psychology”

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• The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Society, Scarcity, Natural

  Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

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• Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering.

  Al Gore

  Philosophical, Practice, Special

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• A love of flowers would beget early rising, industry, habits of close observation, and of reading. It would incline the mind to notice natural phenomena, and to reason upon them. It would occupy the mind with pure thoughts, and inspire a sweet and gentle enthusiasm; maintain simplicity of taste; and ... unfold in the heart an enlarged, unstraightened, ardent piety.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Education, Sweet, Reading

  Henry Ward Beecher (1859). “Plain and Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers and Farming”, p.120

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• Of possible quadruple algebras the one that had seemed to him by far the most beautiful and remarkable was practically identical with quaternions, and that he thought it most interesting that a calculus which so strongly appealed to the human mind by its intrinsic beauty and symmetry should prove to be especially adapted to the study of natural phenomena. The mind of man and that of Nature's God must work in the same channels.

  Benjamin Peirce

  Beautiful, God, Nature

  "The American Mathematical Monthly: The Official Journal of the Mathematical Association of America, Volume 32". Book published by The Association (p. 6), 1925.

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• I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.

  Marie Curie

  Children, Science, Thinking

  "Madame Curie: A Biography". Book by Eve Curie Labouisse translated by Vincent Sheean, 1937.

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• I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.

  Hubert Selby, Jr.

  Pain, Thinking, Here I Am

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• The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

  Edith Wharton

  Mirrors, August, Cities

  Edith Wharton (2014). “Edith Wharton The Dover Reader”, p.271, Courier Corporation

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• Science-fiction ... can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future.

  Hugo Gernsback

  Fiction, Natural, Imaginative

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• Calamities that are not the result of purely natural phenomena usually have their origins, distant and obscure though they may be, in common human failings.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  May, Common, Failing

  Aung San Suu Kyi, University of Oxford. Refugee Studies Programme (1993). “Towards a true refuge”

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• The creative ability of an artist is manifested only if he succeeds in transforming the natural phenomena into 'another reality.' This part of the creative process as an independent element, if conscious and developed, hints at the possibility of creating a painting.

  Frantisek Kupka

  Creativity, Independent, Artist

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• I have hitherto followed the lines marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a mind behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this mind. I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

  Chapman Cohen

  Data, Mind, Atheism

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• The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

  Emma Goldman

  Ideas, Mind, Atheism

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• One of the great natural phenomena is the way in which a tube of toothpaste suddenly empties itself when it hears that you are planning a trip, so that when you come to pack it is just a twisted shell of its former self, with not even a cubic millimeter left to be squeezed out.

  Robert Benchley

  Travel, Self, Shells

  Robert Benchley (1928). “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Or, David Cooperfield”

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• The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.

  Hubert Selby, Jr.

  Suffering, Degrees, Resistance

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• Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

  Tennessee Williams

  Women, Hysteria, Weapons

  Tennessee Williams (1976). “Three by Tennessee: Sweet Bird of Youth; the Rose Tattoo; the Night of the Iguana”, Signet Classics

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• To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.

  Claude Bernard

  Art, Science, Two

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Events, May

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.505, Courier Corporation

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