1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
Context: The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to each other".
Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 12
“The true science and study of man is man.”
Book I, Preface, as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) by Elizabeth M. Knowles
De la sagesse (1601)
Life of Agesilaus II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
"Description and explanation in linguistics"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)
Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).
“The universe itself is a great autograph of the Almighty.”
"The Material World and Man's Relation Thereto", Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man (1872) edited by Rufus Leighton, p. 9.
Context: Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God. On this world about us He has inscribed His thought, in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. The universe itself is a great autograph of the Almighty.
As quoted from his Letters, in Hankins, Frank Hamilton. 1908. "Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician." Columbia University, Longmans, Green & Company, agents, Chapter IV https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~wyllys/QueteletResources/HankinsQueteletChap4.pdf. p. 99
Context: This great body (the social body) subsists by virtue of conservative principles, as does everything which has proceeded from the hands of the Almighty... When we think we have reached the highest point of the scale we find laws as fixed as those which govern the heavenly bodies: we turn to the phenomena of physics, where the free will of man is entirely effaced, so that the work of the Creator may predominate without hindrance. The collection of these laws, which exist independently of time and of the caprices of man, form a separate science, which I have considered myself entitled to name social physics.
