“In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from hand to have wit, science or opinion.”
La Fille aux yeux d'or (1833)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Honoré de Balzac157
French writer 1799–1850Related quotes
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician
Diary entry (9 March 1850)
Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America
Book One, Chapter II.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One
“The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion.”
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist
Lectures on Education delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, 1855, published in "What Knowledge is of Most Worth", The Westminster Review (July 1859) volume CXLI, p. 1-23, at p. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=5NQ6AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA19 <br class="br">Context: The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. … Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses any thing in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm
On himself
Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…
This is not the place to argue that great question. It is sufficient to remark, that the best-informed and most enlightened men of all creeds and pursuits, agree that truth can never damage truth, and that every truth is allied indissolubly by chains more or less circuitous with all other truths; whilst error, at every step we make in its diffusion, becomes not only wider apart and more discordant from all truths, but has also the additional chance of destruction from all rival errors.
Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 225