“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.”
Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 7: A Sojourn in Cubapage 168, omits the "all". This is a typo: see 1916 edition page 164
Source: The Wilderness World of John Muir
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John Muir183
Scottish-born American naturalist and author 1838–1914Related quotes
V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician
Source: Sushmita Dutta Singh: The Renaissance Man (25 June 1931- 27 Nov 2008) http://zeenews.india.com/blog-print.aspx?nid=2136VP, Zeenews.com
“All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people.”
V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic
Source: London Perceived (1962), Ch. 5, p. 162
Context: Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people.
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968)
Peter Green (1924) British historian
Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, page 58.
John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist
Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 286
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
"Instruments" in The Weather of the Heart (1978)
Context: I endeavor
To hold the I as one only for the cloud
Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed
To be responsible. Its light against my face
Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place
Singing, each compassed by the rest,
The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least.
It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist
Vol. IV, par. 5
Collected Papers (1931-1958)
Context: The ordinary logic has a great deal to say about genera and species, or in our nineteeth century dialect, about classes. Now a class is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a special relation of similarity. But where ordinary logic talks of classes the logic of relatives talks of systems. A system is a set of objects comprising all that stands to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of a whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the comtemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system.
William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…
"The Student Life" in The Medical News (30 September 1905).