A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon ...
Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in...
I had not then learned the philosophy which teaches that he who would attempt enterprises of great command, must begin his government by laying its foundations in his own breast, in control of his own passions & that he who would survey the world mus...
One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back. “Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned. “Writing for me,” Megan had typed. “I’ll write you a tea fortune.” �...
Me too. Do you want to meet me at the golf course after you get off work tomorrow? Then we can see each other all afternoon." "That sounds good." Which it did. But even if she'd said "Do you want to meet me at the surface of the sun?" I'd still have ...
When you kissed me…I felt special. I never really felt like I deserved it. That isn’t your fault. That was me. When I looked down the aisle on our wedding day and you weren’t there, my first thought, as awful as this sounds, wasn’t, “Where ...
Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by whi...
One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not...
I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a phot...
All have the ability to perceive and live in dimensional synthesis, yet they spend time with the sciences trying to separate these realms, splitting the worlds into minutia, seeking the god particle. They are searching high and low, 'out there', for ...
The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.
Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of the world, what possible reason could there be ...
Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things..." she held up four big-knuckled fingers. "...the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these things ar...
What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in... ...
Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.
We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really ...
Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point...
Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You al...
Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement...
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made d...
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of...
