Specks Quotes - Page 5

• The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

  Annie Dillard

  Real, Fall, Rope

  Annie Dillard (1994). “The Annie Dillard reader”, Harpercollins

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• Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.

  Alvar Aalto

  Ideas, Creative, Needs

  Alvar Aalto, Alvar Aalto-museo (1994). “Alvar Aalto: points of contact”

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• I wonder what Heaven must think of the people down here on this small black speck in the universe that is earth, or of all their talk about the last few years-which are no more than a flash compared with eternity-being 'a time of emergency." It's really ridiculous.

  Isoroku Yamamoto

  Thinking, Years, People

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• Scripture suggests that the elements in space were created for the benefit of earth, while evolution suggests that earth is an insignificant speck in vast space.

  Walter Lang

  Space, Elements, Benefits

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• Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.

  Jason Calacanis

  Life, Stars, Simple

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• My fancies are fireflies Specks of living light twinkling in the dark.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Firefly, Dark, Light

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Poems”, p.437, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• In other men we faults can spy,/ And blame the mote that dims their eye;/ Each little speck and blemish find;/ To our own stronger errors blind.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Eye, Men, Errors

  Benjamin Franklin (2004). “Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.82, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• How beautiful is night! A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain, Breaks the serene of heaven.

  Robert Southey

  Beautiful, Night, Clouds

  Robert Southey (1829). “Poetical works”, p.89

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• The light is already there. In Zen Buddhism there's a little speck of dust on the mirror, and that's us.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Mirrors, Light

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• Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' - a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'.

  Adrian Desmond

  Thinking, Cosmos, World

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• In the 50,000 years that followed—a time four to eight times shorter than the entire length of time the Neanderthals existed—the replacement crowd not only settled on almost every habitable speck of land on the planet, they developed technology that allowed them to go to the moon and beyond.

  Svante Paabo

  Moon, Technology, Eight

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• Let menot, even inmyownmind, committheinjustice of taking a speck for the whole.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Let Me, Whole

  1812 The Absentee, ch.11.

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• Truth is a golden thread, seen here and there In small bright specks upon the visible side Of our strange being's party-coloured web.

  Arthur Hugh Clough

  Party, Here And There, Golden

  Arthur Hugh Clough (1865). “Letters and Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough”, p.40

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• When folks git ole en strucken wid de palsy, dey mus' speck ter be laff'd at.

  Joel Chandler Harris

  Folks

  'Nights with Uncle Remus' (1883) ch. 23

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• Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small Speck of Dirt.

  Christiaan Huygens

  Cost, Earth, Dull

  Christiaan Huygens (1722). “The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets”, p.10

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• True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form,
  The bended knee, the eye uplift; is all
  Which men need render; all which God can bear.
  What to the faith are forms? A passing speck,
  A crow upon the sky.

  Philip James Bailey

  Uplifting, Faith, Eye

  Philip James Bailey (1857). “Festus: a poem”, p.113

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• That is a cosmic perspective, that's correct. And in tandem with that, you will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective such as the entire community of astrophysicists leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective, there's this little speck called Earth and you say you're going to do what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  People, Perspective, Community

  "Neil DeGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Cosmos Shouldn't Make You Feel Small". "Fresh Air" with Dave Davies, www.npr.org. February 27, 2014.

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• We in astrophysics we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, "Stop, look at the universe."

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  War, Distance, Army

  "Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's one-man mission". "60 minutes" with Charlie Rose, www.cbsnews.com. March 22, 2015.

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• Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.

  Mason Cooley

  Reality, Garden, White

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• Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Character, Hands, Greed

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.418, OUP Oxford

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• The same Being that fashioned the insect, whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun!

  Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

  God, Two, Space

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 274), 1895.

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• Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, Outward bound.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Dream, Water, Floating

  Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, “Outward Bound”

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• As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. … Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. … They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.

  Donald C. Peattie

  Eye, Men, Thinking

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• God who is goodness and truth is also beauty. It is this innate human and divine longing, found in the company of goodness and truth, that is able to recognize and leap up at beauty and rejoice and know that all is beautiful, that there is not one speck of beauty under the sun that does not mirror back the beauty of God.

  Roberta Bondi

  Beautiful, God, Mirrors

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• If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of multitudinous myriads of stars.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Stars, Moon, Destiny

  Edgar Allan Poe, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Nathaniel Parker Willis, James Russell Lowell (1853). “The works of the late Edgar Allan Poe”, p.142

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