“A good watch may serve to keep a recconing at Sea for some days and to know the time of a Celestial Observ[at]ion: and for this end a good Jewel watch may suffice till a better sort of Watch can be found out. But when the Longitude at sea is once lost, it cannot be found again by any watch.”
Letter to Josiah Burchett (1721), quoted in Longitude (1995) by Dava Sobel, p. 60
Board of Longitude
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Isaac Newton 171
British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern c… 1643–1727Related quotes

Song lyrics, Hounds of Love (1985), The Ninth Wave

“Being at sea is like watching the whole world in high-definition.”
Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 88

Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
Speech http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html at Digital Biota 2 http://www.cyberbiology.org/, Cambridge, UK, (1998) <!-- also quoted in Richard Dawkins' eulogy http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html for Douglas Adams -->
Context: Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, may have been made to have me in it!" This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say.

“You can observe a lot by watching.”
You Can Observe a Lot by Watching: What I've Learned About Teamwork From the Yankees and Life, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 9780470079928
Yogiisms

“Ye keep your watch in the eternal day.”
Voi vigilate ne l'etterno die.
Canto XXX, line 103 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio