Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
"Conversation with a Stone"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1509 of Natural Born Killers (1994). <br class="br">One-and-a-half star reviews
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
"Conversation with a Stone"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Mark Leckey (1964) British artist
"Prop4aShw" (2013)
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
The Dark Ages (1968), p. 188
General sources
Karel Zeman (1910–1989) Czech film director, artist and animator
Proč vůbec točím filmy? Hledám Zemi nikoho, ostrov, na který ještě nevstoupila noha filmařova, planetu, na které ještě žádný režisér nevztyčil vlajku objevitele, svět, který existuje jen v pohádkách. <br class="br">Quoted on the website of the Karel Zeman Museum in Prague (in English http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/en/karel-zeman/quotes and Czech http://www.muzeumkarlazemana.cz/cz/karel-zeman/citaty).
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States
On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (9 May 1984)
Richard Alleine (1611–1681) English clergyman
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 615.
“Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.”
Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) French abbot, theologian
Epistola CVI, sect. 2; translation from Edward Churton The Early English Church ([1840] 1841) p. 324
Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter
as quoted in Discovering Art, – The life time and work of the World’s greatest Artists, MONET; K.E. Sullivan, Brockhamptonpress, London 2004, p. 10
after Monet's death
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer
Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 10
Context: The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?