“We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 1 (p. 3).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update May 1, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ine…" by George Steiner?

George Steiner74

American writer 1929–2020

Related quotes

“Although many of us consider ourselves forward-thinkers, we still cling tenaciously to the old values of the monetary system.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

1. A design for the future.
The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War (2002)

“It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,—this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

“There might be very primitive life in our solar system — single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time.”

Sally Ride (1951–2012) American physicist and astronaut

Scholastic interview (1998)

“A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 11

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 264
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

“The world needs specialists and highly trained people with advanced degrees, no question about it. But the world also needs diversity and versatility. It needs people who know as much about our value system as they do about our solar system system.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Roger B. Smith, chairman, General Motors Corporation, at Albion College, Mich. quoted in: U.S. News & World Report Vol 92 (1982). p. 66.

“A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

58 min 56 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Traveller's Tales [Episode 6]

“I think…. living in such a hard situation when there are terrorists and they slaughter people every night is still hard -- is still a threat. So it's a better idea to speak out for your rights and then die…we will speak out for our rights. This is what we can do, and we tried our best.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Statements in PBS interview with Margaret Warner (October 11, 2013)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

George Steiner74

Related quotes

Related topics