“Our eternity is not real; it resembles us; it is our own invention; its scent is vanity.”
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“Eternity and Eternity,” p. 32
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Skywalking”
“With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 584.
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Thomas Chalmers18
Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of S… 1780–1847Related quotes
Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.
p. 76.
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
The New Hugo Winners: Award-winning Science Fiction Stories Vol. 1 (1989)<!-- Afterword to "Speech Sounds" -->, p. 215
General sources
Context: We are meant to know, or we are amoebae.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know — and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves?
Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know — even if the knowledge endured only for the moment that comes before destruction — than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) Pioneer in anatomy and geology, bishop
quoted in Minds Behind the Brain. A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries by S. Finger, 2000
“Let us start by considering why the attempt to glorify science on its own cannot work.”
Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist
Are You an Illusion (2014). 6.
Context: Let us start by considering why the attempt to glorify science on its own cannot work. This is because human thought operates as a whole. It is an ecosphere, a vast and complex landscape, including, but not confined to, common sense. Science itself is, of course, not a single compartment but a large, thickly wooded area comprising many sciences, an area that merges into those around it. Those sciences vary from physics to anthropology and all of them are shot through with problems coming from areas outside them, such as philosophy and history. Biology, for instance, has to deal with philosophical problems about the concept of life and also with vast historical problems about evolution for which it uses historical methods, not those of physics.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
These notes were possibly written in preparation for a letter. The meaning is obscure.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist
Source: The Image of the Future, 1973, p. 1 (partly cited in: European Centre for Leisure and Education (1975) Society and leisure. Vol. 7. p. 22)
“The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts”
Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet
"Modo di filosofare".
Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: All hopes and despairs vanish in the voracious, funneling whirlwind of God. God laughs, wails, kills, sets us on fire, and then leaves us in the middle of the way, charred embers.
And I rejoice to feel between my temples, in the flicker of an eyelid, the beginning and the end of the world.
I condense into a lightning moment the seeding, sprouting, blossoming, fructifying, and the disappearance of every tree, animal, man, star, and god.
All Earth is a seed planted in the coils of my mind. Whatever struggles for numberless years to unfold and fructify in the dark womb of matter bursts in my head like a small and silent lightning flash.
Ah! let us gaze intently on this lightning flash, let us hold it for a moment, let us arrange it into human speech.
Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.