
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
Pearls of Wisdom
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
“What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor?”
A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe (1756)
Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 279.
Pt. III, ch. 1, sec. 7.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
“There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time.”
The Green Brain (1966)
Context: There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time.
Context: "A slave is one who must produce wealth for another," the Brain said. "There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?"
“Universal suffrage is one kind of democracy, but it is not the only way of democracy.”
Sonia Chan (2019) cited in " Secretary Sonia Chan Backed into Corner Over Political Reform https://macaudailytimes.com.mo/secretary-sonia-chan-backed-into-corner-over-political-reform.html" on Macau Daily Times, 7 August 2019
Young India (8 April 1926)
1920s
Source: Blackwood Farm (2002)
Context: "No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope – that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
Source: Science is Not Enough (1967), p. 28 - 29
Context: We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble.
But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes.
And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blindly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power, but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent.
But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life.