1. Ursula K Le Guin
From The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts, 1974And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer — the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.
2. Walter Pater
From Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.
3. Thomas Kuhn
From The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962Yet one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists.
The practice of normal science depends on the ability, acquired from exemplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question, “Similar with respect to what?” One central aspect of any revolution is, then, that some of the similarity relations change. Objects that were grouped in the same set before are grouped in different ones afterward and vice versa. Think of the sun, moon, Mars, and earth before and after Copernicus; of free fall, pendular, and planetary motion before and after Galileo; or of salts, alloys, and a sulpuhur-iron filing mix before and after Dalton.
4. Loren Eiseley
From The Immense Journey, 1957A billion years have gone into the making of that eye; the water and the salt and the vapors of the sun have built it; things that squirmed in the tide silts have devised it. Light-year beyond light-year, deep beyond deep, the mind may rove by means of it, hanging above the bottomless and surveying impartially the state of matter in the white-dwarf suns.
Yet whenever I see a frog’s eye low in the water warily ogling the shoreward landscape, I always think inconsequentially of those twiddling mechanical eyes that mankind manipulates nightly from a thousand observatories. Someday, with a telescopic lens an acre in extent, we are going to see something not to out liking, some looming shape outside there across the great pond of space.
Whenever I catch a frog’s eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing. I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
5. Italo Calvino
From Mr. Palomar, 1983Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the entire universe.
And thus this new phase of his itinerary in search of wisdom is also achieved. Finally his gaze can rove freely inside himself. What will he see? Will his inner world seem to him an immense, calm rotation of a luminous spiral? Will he see stars and planets navigating in silence on the parabolas and ellipses that determine character and destiny? Will he contemplate a sphere of infinite circumference that has the ego as its center and its center in every point?
6. Giordano Bruno
From The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.
7. John Ashbery
From The Double Dream of Spring, 1970
All kinds of things exist, and, what is more, Specimens of these things, which do not make themselves known. / I am speaking of the laugh of the squire and the spur / Which are like a hole in the armor of the day. / It’s annoying and then it's so natural
That we experience almost no feeling / Except a certain lightness which matches / The recent closed ambiance which is, besides, / Full of attentions for us. Thus, lightness and wealth.
But the existence of all these things and especially / The amazing fullness of their number must be / For us a source of unforgettable questions: / Such as: whence does all this come? and again: / Shall I some day be a part of all this fullness?
…Everything is a landscape
8. Philip Ball
From The Quantum Origin of Time, BBC, 2016… we can regard retrocausality as a kind of fuzziness in the “crystallisation of the present” — Ellis has argued that the past is not always fully defined at any instant. It is like a block of ice that contains little blobs of water that have not yet crystallized. Even though the broad outline of events at a particular instant has been decided, some of the fine details remain fluid until a later time. Then, when this “fixing” of the details happens, it looks like they have retrospective consequences.
9. Trumbull Stickney
From The Soul of Time, 1904
Time’s a circumference
Whereof the segment of our station seems
A long straight line from nothing into naught.
Therefore we say “progress,” “infinity” —
Dull words whose object
Hangs in the air of error and delights
Our boyish minds a hunt for butterflies.
For aspiration studies not the sky
But looks for stars
From I Used to Think, 1905
- I used to think
- The mind essential in the body, even
- As stood the body essential in the mind:
- Two inseparable things, by nature equal
- And similar, and in creation’s song
- Halving the total scale: it is not so.
- Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come
- Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine,
- A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each
- With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain
- Sheathing each other’s splinters: till at last
- Without all stuff or shape they’re jetted up
- Where in the bluish moisture rot whate’er
- Was vomited in horror from the sea.
10. G.W.F. Hegel
From The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they do not merely contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.