“Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
Aphorism 1
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
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Francis Bacon295
English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and auth… 1561–1626Related quotes
“One can never do anything so beautiful as nature.”
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 300
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.
“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer
Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 4 (The Master Summoner)
“Von dem Bach is so clever he can do anything, get around anything.”
Erich von dem Bach (1899–1972) German politician and SS functionary
Adolf Hitler, as quoted in The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (1978) by Thomas D. Parrish and Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, p. 45
“So much one man can do,
That does both act and know.”
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician
Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650)
