“I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold.”

—  David Mitchell , book Cloud Atlas

"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 133
Cloud Atlas (2004), Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Part 1)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 26, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold." by David Mitchell?
David Mitchell photo
David Mitchell 68
English novelist 1969

Related quotes

Leo Tolstoy photo

“Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Tolstoy's Diaries (1985) edited and translated by R. F. Christian. London: Athlone Press, Vol 2, p. 512
Context: People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can't be otherwise, because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.

John Maynard Keynes photo

“In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), p. 172
Context: Those who advocate the return to a gold standard do not always appreciate along what different lines our actual practice has been drifting. If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment? Or are we to continue and develop the experimental innovations of our present policy, ignoring the "bank ration" and, if necessary, allowing unmoved a piling up of gold reserves far beyond our requirements or their depletion far below them? In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

Thomas Hood photo

“Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Her Moral; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

“Europeans were anxious to acquire gold in Africa because there was a pressing need for gold coin within the growing capitalist money economy.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 119.

Torquato Tasso photo

“This is truly the age of gold,
since only gold wins and gold reigns.”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

Veramente il secol d'oro è questo,
Poiché sol vince l'oro, e regna l'oro.
Act II, scene i.
Aminta (1573)

Oswald Pohl photo

“I assumed that some of the gold bars I received were melted gold teeth.”

Oswald Pohl (1892–1951) Head of the SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt

To Leon Goldensohn, June 5, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
"The Nuremberg Interviews"

P. L. Travers photo

“What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

Jane in Ch. 8 "Mrs. Corry"
Mary Poppins (1934)

Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations

Geoffrey Chaucer photo

“But all thing which that shineth as the gold
Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

The Chanones Yemannes Tale, l. 16430
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Canterbury Tales

Related topics