TERMS STARTING WITH
Chemistry [from Greek chemeia] An ancient art or science relating to the extraction of medicinal juices from plants, or of metals from their earths, or the transmutation of physical elements, as of base metals into gold, the preparation of elixirs, and other things usually connected with alchemy, from which modern chemistry is a derivative along specialized line.
chemistry; alchemy; the philosopher's stone.
chemistry ::: n. --> That branch of science which treats of the composition of substances, and of the changes which they undergo in consequence of alterations in the constitution of the molecules, which depend upon variations of the number, kind, or mode of arrangement, of the constituent atoms. These atoms are not assumed to be indivisible, but merely the finest grade of subdivision hitherto attained. Chemistry deals with the changes in the composition and constitution of molecules. See Atom, Molecule.
TERMS ANYWHERE
actino-chemistry ::: n. --> Chemistry in its relations to actinism.
Aion Development System "artificial intelligence, product" (ADS) A commericial {expert system shell} developed by {Aion Corporation} that supported {forward chainging} and {backward chaining} and featured an {object-oriented} {knowledge representation} scheme, graphics and integrated with other {programming languages} like {C} and {Pascal}. ["Expert Systems in Chemistry Research", Markus C. Hemmer]. (2014-10-05)
al- ::: A prefix. --> All; wholly; completely; as, almighty, almost.
To; at; on; -- in OF. shortened to a-. See Ad-.
The Arabic definite article answering to the English the; as, Alkoran, the Koran or the Book; alchemy, the chemistry.
alchemistry ::: n. --> Alchemy.
alchemy ::: n. --> An imaginary art which aimed to transmute the baser metals into gold, to find the panacea, or universal remedy for diseases, etc. It led the way to modern chemistry.
A mixed metal composed mainly of brass, formerly used for various utensils; hence, a trumpet.
Miraculous power of transmuting something common into something precious.
Alchemy: The science of decomposing and recomposing things, as well as of changing their essential nature and raising it higher—transmuting them into each other. While chemistry deals with lifeless matter, alchemy employs life as a factor, and deals with higher forces of nature and the conditions of matter under which they operate. In its lowest aspect, it deals with physical substances, but in its highest aspect it teaches the regeneration of the spiritual man, the purification of mind, will and thought, and the ennobling of all the faculties of the human soul.
aqua ::: n. --> Water; -- a word much used in pharmacy and the old chemistry, in various signification, determined by the word or words annexed.
Chemistry [from Greek chemeia] An ancient art or science relating to the extraction of medicinal juices from plants, or of metals from their earths, or the transmutation of physical elements, as of base metals into gold, the preparation of elixirs, and other things usually connected with alchemy, from which modern chemistry is a derivative along specialized line.
biochemistry ::: n. --> The chemistry of living organisms; the chemistry of the processes incidental to, and characteristic of, life.
Biometry: The scientific application of mathematical analysis to biological problems (also spoken of as "mathematical biophysics" and "mathematical biochemistry"). The journal Biometrtka was founded by Karl Pearson. -- W.M.M.
butter ::: n. --> An oily, unctuous substance obtained from cream or milk by churning.
Any substance resembling butter in degree of consistence, or other qualities, especially, in old chemistry, the chlorides, as butter of antimony, sesquichloride of antimony; also, certain concrete fat oils remaining nearly solid at ordinary temperatures, as butter of cacao, vegetable butter, shea butter.
One who, or that which, butts.
chemical ::: a. --> Pertaining to chemistry; characterized or produced by the forces and operations of chemistry; employed in the processes of chemistry; as, chemical changes; chemical combinations. ::: n. --> A substance used for producing a chemical effect; a reagent.
chemist "jargon" (Cambridge) Someone who wastes computer time on {number crunching} when you'd far rather the computer were working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running {life} patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-07)
chemist ::: (jargon) (Cambridge) Someone who wastes computer time on number crunching when you'd far rather the computer were working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running life patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry.[Jargon File] (1995-02-07)
chemist ::: n. --> A person versed in chemistry or given to chemical investigation; an analyst; a maker or seller of chemicals or drugs.
chemistry; alchemy; the philosopher's stone.
chemistry ::: n. --> That branch of science which treats of the composition of substances, and of the changes which they undergo in consequence of alterations in the constitution of the molecules, which depend upon variations of the number, kind, or mode of arrangement, of the constituent atoms. These atoms are not assumed to be indivisible, but merely the finest grade of subdivision hitherto attained. Chemistry deals with the changes in the composition and constitution of molecules. See Atom, Molecule.
chymistry ::: --> See Chemic, Chemist, Chemistry.
computational chemistry ::: A branch of chemistry that uses computer simulation to assist in solving chemical problems.
Comte, Auguste: (1798-1857) Was born and lived during a period when political and social conditions in France were highly unstable. In reflecting the spirit of his age, he rose against the tendency prevalent among his predecessors to propound philosophic doctrines in disregard of the facts of nature and society. His revolt was directed particularly against traditional metaphysics with its endless speculations, countless assumptions, and futile controversies. To his views he gave the name of positivism. According to him, the history of humanity should be described in terms of three stages. The first of these was the theological stage when people's interpretation of reality was dominated by superstitions and prejudicesj the second stage was metaphysical when people attempted to comprehend, and reason about, reality, but were unable to support their contentions by facts; and the third and final stage was positive, when dogmatic assumptions began to be replaced by factual knowledge. Accordingly, the history of thought was characterized by a certain succession of sciences, expressing the turning of scholarly interest toward the earthly and human affairs, namely; mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. These doctrines were discussed in Comte's main work, Cours de philosophic positive. -- R.B.W.
Conventional Sciences ::: Science as applied to our known physical world. Includes fields such as chemistry, physics, and biology. Contrasted with Occult Sciences.
electro-chemical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to electro-chemistry.
electro-chemistry ::: n. --> That branch of science which treats of the relation of electricity to chemical changes.
Element ::: In modern chemistry, these are fundamental building blocks of matter. Types of atoms determined by the number of protons in the nucleus. In the occult sciences an element is a fundamental building block of reality; it is a way to classify experiences as well as matter. The classifications for elements and their correspondences differ between traditions and systems. On this site an element is one of the four classical elements of Western Hermetic theory (Fire, Air, Water, and Earth) and each is associated with a particular plane in the Four Worlds model as well as one of four sub-planes within each of those planes. Each classical element also corresponds to a state of matter and a quality of physical reality. The elements are a rather complicated topic to broach sufficiently so click the title to view the actual page that goes into details on these and the magic involving them.
homologue ::: n. --> That which is homologous to something else; as, the corresponding sides, etc., of similar polygons are the homologues of each other; the members or terms of an homologous series in chemistry are the homologues of each other; one of the bones in the hand of man is the homologue of that in the paddle of a whale.
Hydrogeology ::: The geology of groundwater, with particular emphasis on the chemistry and movement of water.
iatrochemical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to iatrochemistry, or to the iatrochemists.
iatrochemist ::: n. --> A physician who explained or treated diseases upon chemical principles; one who practiced iatrochemistry.
iatrochemistry ::: n. --> Chemistry applied to, or used in, medicine; -- used especially with reference to the doctrines in the school of physicians in Flanders, in the 17th century, who held that health depends upon the proper chemical relations of the fluids of the body, and who endeavored to explain the conditions of health or disease by chemical principles.
Idealists regard such an equalization of physical laws and psychological, historical laws as untenable. The "tvpical case" with which physics or chemistry analyzes is a result of logical abstraction; the object of history, however, is not a unit with universal traits but something individual, in a singular space and at a particular time, never repeatable under the same circumstances. Therefore no physical laws can be formed about it. What makes it a fact worthy of historical interest, is iust the fullness of live activity in it; it is a "value", not a "thing". Granted that historical events are exposed to influences from biological, geological, racial and traditional sources, they aie always carried by a human being whose singularity of character has assimilated the forces of his environment and surmounted them There is a reciprocal action between man and society, but it is always personal initiative and free productivity of the individual which account for history. Denying, therefore, the logical primacy of physical laws in history, does not mean lawlessness, and that is the standpoint of the logic of history in more recent times. Windelband and H. Rickert established another kind of historical order of laws. On their view, to understand history one must see the facts in their relation to a universally applicable and transcendental system of values. Values "are" not, they "hold"; they are not facts but realities of our reason, they are not developed but discovered. According to Max Weber historical facts form an ideally typical, transcendental whole which, although seen, can never be fully explained. G, Simmel went further into metaphysics: "life" is declared an historical category, it is the indefinable, last reality ascending to central values which shaped cultural epochs, such as the medieval idea of God, or the Renaissance-idea of Nature, only to be tragically disappointed, whereupon other values rise up, as humanity, liberty, technique, evolution and others.
In alchemy and chemistry, applied to any substance which emitted light, but was monopolized for the familiar chemical element first isolated by Brandt of Hamburg in 1669.
In chemistry, an atom, radical, or element that has a combining power of four. See also QUATERNARY; TETRAKTYS; TETRAGRAMMATON
In regard to the remarkable achievements that the Atlanteans made in all the arts and sciences, we read that the early fifth root-race received their knowledge from the fourth root-race. “It is from them that they learnt aeronautics, Viwan Vidya [vimana-vidya] (the ‘knowledge of flying in air-vehicles’), and, therefore, their great arts of meteorography and meteorology. It is from them, again, that the Aryans inherited their most valuable science of the hidden virtues of precious and other stones, of chemistry, or rather alchemy, of mineralogy, geology, physics and astronomy” (SD 2:426).
In theosophy, atoms have to be considered in relation to monads; in The Secret Doctrine gods, monads, and atoms are a triad like spirit, soul, and body. A monad is a divine-spiritual life-atom, a living being, evolving on its own plane, and a life-atom is the vehicle of the monad which ensouls it, and in turn ensouls a physical atom. The ultimates of nature are atoms on the material side, monads on the energic side; monads are indivisible, atoms divisible (a departure from the etymological meaning). Thus there is a quaternary of gods, monads, life-atoms, and physical atoms. “An atom may be compared to (and is for the Occultist) the seventh principle of a body or rather of a molecule. The physical or chemical molecule is composed of an infinity of finer molecules and these in their turn of innumerable and still finer molecules. Take for instance a molecule of iron and so resolve it that it becomes non-molecular; it is then, at once transformed into one of its seven principles, viz., its astral body; the seventh of these is the atom. The analogy between a molecule of iron, before it is broken up, and this same molecule after resolution, is the same as that between a physical body before and after death. The principle remains minus the body. Of course this is occult alchemy, not modern chemistry” (TBL 84).
In The Secret Doctrine chemistry is mentioned as being, together with biology, one of the magicians of the future, especially in its form of chemical physics, when it is no longer the mechanistic science into which it has degenerated. “In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to and depends on its higher noumenon — the Being to whose essence it belongs; and above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the psycho-mental from the Spiritual — tainted from its lower plane by the astral — the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as from below” (SD 1:218).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory "body" (LLNL) A research organaisatin operated by the {University of California} under a contract with the US Department of Energy. LLNL was founded on 2 September 1952 at the site of an old World War II naval air station. The Lab employs researchers from many scientific and engineering disciplines. Some of its departments are the National Ignition Facility, the Human Genome Center, the ASCI Tera-Scale Computing partnership, the Computer Security Technology Center, and the Site 300 Experimental Test Facility. Other research areas are Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Automation and Robotics, Biology, Chemistry, Computing, Energy Research, Engineering, Environmental Science, Fusion, Geology and Geophysics, Health, Lasers and Optics, Materials Science, National Security, Physics, Sensors and Instrumentation, Space Science. LLNL also works with industry in research and licensing projects. At the end of fiscal year 1995, the lab had signed agreements for 193 cost-shared research projects involving 201 companies and worth nearly $600m. {(http://llnl.gov/)}. Address: Fremont, California, USA. (1996-10-30)
literature ::: n. --> Learning; acquaintance with letters or books.
The collective body of literary productions, embracing the entire results of knowledge and fancy preserved in writing; also, the whole body of literary productions or writings upon a given subject, or in reference to a particular science or branch of knowledge, or of a given country or period; as, the literature of Biblical criticism; the literature of chemistry.
The class of writings distinguished for beauty of style
macro-chemistry ::: n. --> The science which treats of the chemical properties, actions or relations of substances in quantity; -- distinguished from micro-chemistry.
magistery ::: n. --> Mastery; powerful medical influence; renowned efficacy; a sovereign remedy.
A magisterial injunction.
A precipitate; a fine substance deposited by precipitation; -- applied in old chemistry to certain white precipitates from metallic solutions; as, magistery of bismuth.
mechanico-chemical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, connected with, or dependent upon, both mechanics and chemistry; -- said especially of those sciences which treat of such phenomena as seem to depend on the laws both of mechanics and chemistry, as electricity and magnetism.
Mental Chemistry: Psychological procedure, analogous to chemical analysis and synthesis, consisting in the attempted explanation of mental states as the products of the combination and fusion of psychic elements. See Associationism. -- L.W.
Mental chemistry: Psychological procedure, analogous to chemical analysis and synthesis, consisting in the attempted explanation of mental states as the products of the combination and fusion of psychic elements.
micro-chemical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to micro-chemistry; as, a micro-chemical test.
micro-chemistry ::: n. --> The application of chemical tests to minute objects or portions of matter, magnified by the use of the microscopy; -- distinguished from macro-chemistry.
neo- ::: --> A prefix meaning new, recent, late; and in chemistry designating specifically that variety of metameric hydrocarbons which, when the name was applied, had been recently classified, and in which at least one carbon atom in connected directly with four other carbon atoms; -- contrasted with normal and iso-; as, neopentane; the neoparaffins. Also used adjectively.
neology ::: n. --> The introduction of a new word, or of words or significations, into a language; as, the present nomenclature of chemistry is a remarkable instance of neology.
A new doctrine; esp. (Theol.), a doctrine at variance with the received interpretation of revealed truth; a new method of theological interpretation; rationalism.
Neuroscience - any or all of the sciences, such as neurochemistry and experimental psychology, which deal with the structure or function of the nervous system and brain. See /r/neuro
nomenclature ::: n. --> A name.
A vocabulary, dictionary, or glossary.
The technical names used in any particular branch of science or art, or by any school or individual; as, the nomenclature of botany or of chemistry; the nomenclature of Lavoisier and his associates.
Nyquist Theorem "communications" A theorem stating that when an {analogue} waveform is digitised, only the frequencies in the waveform below half the {sampling frequency} will be recorded. In order to reconstruct (interpolate) a signal from a sequence of samples, sufficient samples must be recorded to capture the peaks and troughs of the original waveform. If a waveform is sampled at less than twice its frequency the reconstructed waveform will effectively contribute only {noise}. This phenomenon is called "aliasing" (the high frequencies are "under an alias"). This is why the best digital audio is sampled at 44,000 Hz - twice the average upper limit of human hearing. The Nyquist Theorem is not specific to digitised signals (represented by discrete amplitude levels) but applies to any sampled signal (represented by discrete time values), not just sound. {Nyquist (http://geocities.com/bioelectrochemistry/nyquist.htm)} (the man, somewhat inaccurate). (2003-10-21)
Phlogiston [from Greek phlog fire] In the 17th century modern chemistry was in process of birth and alchemical ideas still survived, particularly those of the four elements and of the triad of sulphur, salt, and mercury. Stahl (1660-1734) enumerated four elements — water, acid, earth, phlogiston; and the phlogiston theory was elaborated by Priestley (1733-1804). All combustible bodies, it was said, contain phlogiston, and when they are burnt the phlogiston leaves its latent state and escapes from the body in the form of heat and light, leaving behind the ash or dephlogisticated residue. For example, magnesium gives out its phlogiston in an intense light and an inert ash is left. But later chemistry banished the imponderables, and formulated a physical system composed of ponderable matter and energy. Accordingly, when it was shown that the ash weighs more than the original substance, the phlogiston theory was abandoned, and in its place came abstract and indefinite conceptions quite as difficult of explanation as was the phlogiston theory itself, which may be grouped under the general term energy, and include heat, light, chemical energy, etc. The more recent progress of science has proved that the atomo-mechanical system, the representation of the physical world as divisible into matter and energy, or mass and motion, however useful in interpreting molar physics and facilitating practical applications, does not suffice for an interpretation of the intra-molecular world. The distinction between matter (or mass) and energy has become obliterated.
photochemistry ::: n. --> The branch of chemistry which relates to the effect of light in producing chemical changes, as in photography.
physicochemical ::: a. --> Involving the principles of both physics and chemistry; dependent on, or produced by, the joint action of physical and chemical agencies.
Physics: (Gr. physis, nature) In Greek philosophy, one of the three branches of philosophy, Logic and Ethics being the other two among the Stoics (q.v.). In Descartes, metaphysics is the root and physics the trunk of the "tree of knowledge." Today, it is the science (overlapping chemistry, biology and human physiology) of the calculation and prediction of the phenomena of motion of microscopic or macroscopic bodies, e.g. gravitation, pressure, heat, light, sound, magnetism, electricity, radio-activity, etc. Philosophical problems arise concerning the relation of physics to biological and social phenomena, to pure mathematics, and to metaphysics. See Mechanism, Physicalism.. Physis: See Nature, Physics. Picturesque: A modification of the beautiful in English aesthetics, 18th century. -- L.V.
physiological ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to physiology; relating to the science of the functions of living organism; as, physiological botany or chemistry.
phyto- ::: --> A combining form from Gr. fyto`n a plant; as, phytochemistry, phytography.
phytochemical ::: a. --> Relating to phytochemistry.
phytochemistry ::: n. --> Chemistry in its relation to vegetable bodies; vegetable chemistry.
phytochimy ::: n. --> Phytochemistry.
Polarity The property of having poles; duality throughout nature. Poles are antithetical in quality and yet interdependent; each presupposes the other, as without the other neither can exist. Similar poles repel, dissimilar attract. As long as they are apart, there is force; when they coalesce, they are said to neutralize each other — the force becomes latent. The most fundamental polarity is that of spirit and matter, which may also be called positive and negative, active and passive, etc. This is repeated endlessly on every plane and subplane. When the One becomes Two, it becomes polar; when the Two rebecomes the One, it ceases to be polar. The expansive and contractive forces (in themselves constituting a polarity) are seen everywhere in evolution and involution. The polarity of right and left is hard to define absolutely, but gains significance when we consider the right-handed and left-handed groupings of atoms in the molecules of such compounds as dextrose and levulose — a contrast of similarities. In magnetism, electricity, and chemistry, we have familiar instances of polarity, in which the above general laws are illustrated. In the germinal cell, the One becomes the Two by the extrusion of the polar bodies. The human body is polar; Reichenbach discovered polarity in plants and minerals, as shown by the colors seen by his sensitives.
practical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to practice or action.
Capable of being turned to use or account; useful, in distinction from ideal or theoretical; as, practical chemistry.
Evincing practice or skill; capable of applying knowledge to some useful end; as, a practical man; a practical mind.
Derived from practice; as, practical skill.
Program Composition Notation ::: (PCN) A specification language for parallelism between C and Fortran modules. PCN provides a simple language for specifying concurrent algorithms, interfaces modelling, fluid dynamics, computational biology, chemistry, and circuit simulation.Version 2.0 runs on networks of workstations: Sun-4, NeXT, RS/6000, SGI; multicomputers: iPSC/860, Touchstone DELTA; and shared memory multiprocessors: Symmetry/Dynix. .E-mail: Ian Foster , Steve Tuecke .[Productive Parallel Programming: The PCN Approach, I. Foster et al, Sci Prog 1(1):51-66 (1992)]. (1993-02-12)
Program Composition Notation (PCN) A specification language for parallelism between {C} and {Fortran} {modules}. PCN provides a simple language for specifying {concurrent} {algorithms}, interfaces to {Fortran} and {C}, a portable toolkit that allows applications to be developed on a {workstation} or small parallel computer and run unchanged on {supercomputers} and integrated debugging and performance analysis tools. PCN was developed at {Argonne National Laboratory} and the {California Institute of Technology}. It has been used to develop a wide variety of applications, in areas such as climate modelling, fluid dynamics, computational biology, chemistry, and circuit simulation. Version 2.0 runs on networks of workstations: {Sun-4}, {NeXT}, {RS/6000}, {SGI}; {multicomputers}: {iPSC}/860, {Touchstone DELTA}; and {shared memory} multiprocessors: {Symmetry}/{Dynix}. {(ftp://info.mcs.anl.gov/pub/pcn)}. E-mail: Ian Foster "pcn@mcs.anl.gov", Steve Tuecke "tuecke@mcs.anl.gov". ["Productive Parallel Programming: The PCN Approach", I. Foster et al, Sci Prog 1(1):51-66 (1992)]. (1993-02-12)
Salt Used in alchemy for a fundamental principle of nature, a member of the triad mercury, sulphur, and salt, corresponding to spirit, soul, and body; or to fire (or air), water, and earth. Paracelsus regarded these as the mystical elements of all compound bodies. All forms of matter were reducible to one or other of them — everything was either a sulphur, a mercury, a salt, or a compound. The philosopher’s stone was said to be a compound of all three. Thus salt is the physical rudiment, as illustrated by the cubical crystals of common salt. Ancient thought regarded such elements as fundamental principles which manifest on various planes, nor did it make hard and fast distinctions between physical and nonphysical; but modern thought has given a fictitious reality to physical objects, and regards the ancient use of the terms as metaphorical. The veneration shown for salt was not a mere deification of its physical virtues, but a recognition of the salt-principle in nature, of which ordinary salt is merely a physical emblem. The well-known stimulant, flavoring, and preservative qualities of salt prove it to be a physical manifestation of an important principle; such phrases as bread and salt, and salt of the earth are therefore theosophy, as concerns not merely figures of speech but a use of salt in its more radical sense. For the same reason it played an important part, along with other substances, in sacrificial ceremonies. The word was also used to include other bodies besides sodium chloride or common salt, and is still used in chemistry in this generic sense. With some alchemists we find arsenic taking the place of salt in the fundamental triad, and this would be one of the salts of arsenic.
SPEC CFP92 "benchmark" A {benchmark} suite from {SPEC} containing 14 programs performing {floating-point} computations. 12 are written in {Fortran} and two in {C}. They can be used to estimate the performance of CPU, memory system, and compiler code generation. The individual programs are Circuit Design, Simulation (2x), Quantum Chemistry (3x), Electromagnetism, Geometric Translation, Optics, Robotics, Medical Simulation, Quantum Physics, Astrophysics, NASA Kernels. The benchmark suite can be used either for speed measurement, resulting in {SPEC ratios}, or for throughput measurement, resulting in {SPEC rates} (1994-11-15)
SPEC CFP92 ::: (benchmark) A benchmark suite from SPEC containing 14 programs performing floating-point computations. 12 are written in Fortran and two in C. They can be used to estimate the performance of CPU, memory system, and compiler code generation.The individual programs are Circuit Design, Simulation (2x), Quantum Chemistry (3x), Electromagnetism, Geometric Translation, Optics, Robotics, Medical Simulation, Quantum Physics, Astrophysics, NASA Kernels.The benchmark suite can be used either for speed measurement, resulting in SPEC ratios, or for throughput measurement, resulting in SPEC rates (1994-11-15)
stereo- ::: --> A combining form meaning solid, hard, firm, as in stereo-chemistry, stereography.
stereo-chemistry ::: n. --> Chemistry considered with reference to the space relations of atoms.
supercomputer ::: (computer) A broad term for one of the fastest computers currently available. Such computers are typically used for number crunching including dynamics, physics, chemistry, electronic design, nuclear energy research and meteorology. Perhaps the best known supercomputer manufacturer is Cray Research.A less serious definition, reported from about 1990 at The University Of New South Wales states that a supercomputer is any computer that can outperform IBM's current fastest, thus making it impossible for IBM to ever produce a supercomputer. (1996-12-13)
supercomputer "computer" A broad term for one of the fastest computers currently available. Such computers are typically used for {number crunching} including scientific {simulations}, (animated) {graphics}, analysis of geological data (e.g. in petrochemical prospecting), structural analysis, computational fluid dynamics, physics, chemistry, electronic design, nuclear energy research and meteorology. Perhaps the best known supercomputer manufacturer is {Cray Research}. A less serious definition, reported from about 1990 at The {University Of New South Wales} states that a supercomputer is any computer that can outperform {IBM}'s current fastest, thus making it impossible for IBM to ever produce a supercomputer. (1996-12-13)
tartro- ::: --> A combining form (also used adjectively) used in chemistry to denote the presence of tartar or of some of its compounds or derivatives.
terminology ::: n. --> The doctrine of terms; a theory of terms or appellations; a treatise on terms.
The terms actually used in any business, art, science, or the like; nomenclature; technical terms; as, the terminology of chemistry.
Tetravalent ::: A four-sided aspect or property. This is not the "tetravalency" you might see in chemistry. In the occult literature it is usually used in respect to awareness or reality, as in the "tetravalent qualities of experiential reality" which can refer to the four elemental aspects present in each frame of experience up until Causal Consciousness/Root Awareness is unfurled. That is how the term is used on Lux Saturni as well, unless indicated otherwise.
thermo- ::: --> A combining form from Gr. qe`rmh heat, qermo`s hot, warm; as in thermochemistry, thermodynamic.
thermochemical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to thermochemistry; obtained by, or employed in, thermochemistry.
thermochemistry ::: n. --> That branch of chemical science which includes the investigation of the various relations existing between chemical action and that manifestation of force termed heat, or the determination of the heat evolved by, or employed in, chemical actions.
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
Transmutation Generally the transmutation of inferior metals into gold, although the reverse process properly falls under the same term. Three things are involved: the old metal, the new metal, and the underlying essence common to both. To transmute lead into gold we must change something which is now lead so that this something will then be gold. Transmutations are now being performed in chemistry on this principle. The alchemists reasoned that, since all elements come from a root-element, it must be possible to perform transmutations by reducing the gross elements to their subtle substratum. Apart from the love of knowledge, one sees no object in the physical process other than that of acquisitive gain. If the language of alchemy is taken allegorically, as it very frequently was and is, transmutation means the refinement of the gross elements of human nature. The scientific thinkers and researchers who are leading the world in scientific experimentation in the ultimates of matter are the modern alchemists or transmutationists.
trial ::: n. --> The act of trying or testing in any manner.
Any effort or exertion of strength for the purpose of ascertaining what can be done or effected.
The act of testing by experience; proof; test.
Examination by a test; experiment, as in chemistry, metallurgy, etc.
The state of being tried or tempted; exposure to suffering that tests strength, patience, faith, or the like; affliction or
Vajra (Sanskrit) Vajra Diamond or thunderbolt; one possessing this scepter, or diamond-thunderbolt, possesses great spiritual, intellectual, and psychic powers; among others, the occult ability to repel evil influences by purifying the air, as ozone does in chemistry. The vajra mystically refers to indestructibility and to the wondrous reflective powers of the diamond. One who possesses the vajra reflects the suffering, joys, and sorrows — and beauties — of the world, but can never be injured by them. It has been said that the heart of the perfect person is a mirror: it reflects all things, but holds nothing for self alone. Thus also is the heart of one wielding the scepter of the vajra.
xantho- ::: --> A combining form from Gr. xanqo`s yellow; as in xanthocobaltic salts. Used also adjectively in chemistry.
zinco- ::: --> A combining form from zinc; in chemistry, designating zinc as an element of certain double compounds. Also used adjectively.
zoochemical ::: a. --> Pertaining to zoochemistry.
zoochemistry ::: n. --> Animal chemistry; particularly, the description of the chemical compounds entering into the composition of the animal body, in distinction from biochemistry.
zoochemy ::: n. --> Animal chemistry; zoochemistry.
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2 Alfred Korzybski
1 Richard P Feynman
1 Michio Kaku
1 Ken Wilber
1 The Mother
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 Aleister Crowley
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11 Simone Elkeles
9 Neil deGrasse Tyson
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7 Siddhartha Mukherjee
7 Nick Lane
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7 Carl Sagan
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1:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku, #KEYS
2:An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct" the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry - including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology-all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing. ~ Ken Wilber, #KEYS
3:On the exoteric side if necessary the mind should be trained by the study of any well-developed science, such as chemistry, or mathematics. The idea of organization is the first step, that of interpretation the second. The Master of the Temple, whose grade corresponds to Binah, is sworn to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul. {85} But even the beginner may attempt this practice with advantage. Either a fact fits in or it does not; if it does not, harmony is broken; and as the Universal harmony cannot be broken, the discord must be in the mind of the student, thus showing that he is not in tune with that Universal choir. Let him then puzzle out first the great facts, then the little; until one summer, when he is bald and lethargic after lunch, he understands and appreciates the existence of flies!
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Part II, The Cup,#KEYS
4:A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #KEYS
5:Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo is speaking about occult endeavour here and says that those who don't have the capacity must wait till it is given to them. Can't they get it through practice?
No. That is, if it is latent in someone, it can be developed by practice. But if one doesn't have occult power, he may try for fifty years, he won't get anywhere. Everybody cannot have occult power. It is as though you were asking whether everybody could be a musician, everybody could be a painter, everybody could... Some can, some can't. It is a question of temperament.
What is the difference between occultism and mysticism?
They are not at all the same thing.
Mysticism is a more or less emotive relation with what one senses to be a divine power - that kind of highly emotional, affective, very intense relation with something invisible which is or is taken for the Divine. That is mysticism.
Occultism is exactly what he has said: it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as the knowledge of chemistry for material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces, their different vibrations, their interrelations, the combinations which can be made by bringing them together and the power one can exercise over them. It is absolutely scientific; and it ought to be learnt like a science; that is, one cannot practise occultism as something emotional or something vague and imprecise. You must work at it as you would do at chemistry, and learn all the rules or find them if there is nobody to teach you. But it is at some risk to yourself that you can find them. There are combinations here as explosive as certain chemical combinations. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
6:To analyse the classes of life we have to consider two very different kinds of phenomena: the one embraced under the collective name-Inorganic chemistry-the other under the collective nameOrganic chemistry, or the chemistry of hydro-carbons. These divisions are made because of the peculiar properties of the elements chiefly involved in the second class. The properties of matter are so distributed among the elements that three of them- Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon-possess an ensemble of unique characteristics. The number of reactions in inorganic chemistry are relatively few, but in organic chemistry-in the chemistry of these three elements the number of different compounds is practically unlimited. Up to 1910, we knew of more than 79 elements of which the whole number of reactions amounted to only a few hundreds, but among the remaining three elements-Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen-the reactions were known to be practically unlimited in number and possibilities; this fact must have very far reaching consequences. As far as energies are concerned, we have to take them as nature reveals them to us. Here more than ever, mathematical thinking is essential and will help enormously. The reactions in inorganic chemistry always involve the phenomenon of heat, sometimes light, and in some instances an unusual energy is produced called electricity. Until now, the radioactive elements represent a group too insufficiently known for an enlargement here upon this subject.
The organic compounds being unlimited in number and possibilities and with their unique characteristics, represent of course, a different class of phenomena, but being, at the same time, chemical they include the basic chemical phenomena involved in all chemical reactions, but being unique in many other respects, they also have an infinitely vast field of unique characteristics. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 53,#KEYS
7:If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.
The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
8:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 2:If a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 3:I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 4:The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 5:The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 6:It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 7:A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 8:Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 9:I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 10:Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 11:For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 12:The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 13:Chemistry ceases to improve when one element is found from which all others are deductible. Physics ceases to progress when one force is found of which all others are manifestations. So religion ceases to progress when unity is reached, which is the case with Hinduism. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 14:The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 15:Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 16:Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man & 17:Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 18:Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage& 19:I would say if a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. But to speak of the craft itself, I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer. Writing is like a & 20:And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 21:I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 22:When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from that neural activity. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:dangerous chemistry ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
2:8. Love is chemistry and ~ Paul Levine, #NFDB
3:I was glad I liked chemistry. ~ Andy Grove, #NFDB
4:Chemistry cannot be purchased. ~ Adam Levine, #NFDB
5:Mr. Briggs’s chemistry class ~ Jessica Brody, #NFDB
6:Sacred chemistry is a meta-chemistry. ~ Marc David, #NFDB
7:There's nothing colder than chemistry. ~ Anita Loos, #NFDB
8:To think is to practice brain chemistry. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
9:Every season, really, has their own chemistry. ~ Tom Ford, #NFDB
10:I failed chemistry. I almost failed algebra. ~ Taye Diggs, #NFDB
11:You fall for who the chemistry is with. ~ Vanessa Paradis, #NFDB
12:I could have sexual chemistry with vinegar. ~ Jessica Alba, #NFDB
13:My atoms love you atoms, it’s chemistry. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
14:My atoms love your atoms, it’s chemistry. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
15:One thing that you cant fake is chemistry. ~ Blake Shelton, #NFDB
16:Friendships come down to chemistry, not orders. ~ Karen Swan, #NFDB
17:Chemistry is the dirty part of physics. ~ Johann Philipp Reis, #NFDB
18:I think it just says a lot about our chemistry! ~ Phil Lester, #NFDB
19:Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic, ~ Kathleen Raine, #NFDB
20:I think good chemistry starts with mutual respect. ~ Andy Garcia, #NFDB
21:The divine chemistry works in the subsoil. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
22:Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. ~ Miguel de Unamuno, #NFDB
23:I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
24:I think chemistry and great acting go hand-in-hand. ~ Nate Parker, #NFDB
25:The chemistry among the four of us is very strong. ~ Kim Cattrall, #NFDB
26:The chemistry is so AMAZINGLY HOT” — Mary Darian ~ Scarlett Avery, #NFDB
27:Um" he said. "You mean, like in *chemistry class?* ~ Andrew Smith, #NFDB
28:I think it just says a lot about our chemistry! -Dan ~ Phil Lester, #NFDB
29:...like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
30:You can realign people's physical chemistry with sound. ~ Bob Mould, #NFDB
31:Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry. ~ Roald Hoffmann, #NFDB
32:Personal chemistry forges the way for musical chemistry. ~ Nikki Sixx, #NFDB
33:Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
34:It's all about chemistry. Talent alone won't get it done. ~ Brett Favre, #NFDB
35:I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals. ~ Dorothy Hodgkin, #NFDB
36:It's easy to have chemistry when nobody is sitting on the bench. ~ Shaka, #NFDB
37:When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
38:Chemistry is the melodies you can play on vibrating strings. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
39:Do you know what we do with liars in Chemistry? We kill them. ~ Hank Green, #NFDB
40:Ingredients should not read like a chemistry experiment! ~ Jessica Capshaw, #NFDB
41:Marty stayed busy as a chemistry major at Seattle University, ~ Jamie Ford, #NFDB
42:To chemistry and mystery and discovering exactly what this is. ~ B L Berry, #NFDB
43:Beauty fades, a good personality and chemistry doesn’t. “I ~ Mariana Zapata, #NFDB
44:Had he only thought there was amazing chemistry between them? ~ B J Daniels, #NFDB
45:I really think the key to a film is the chemistry of people. ~ Kirsten Dunst, #NFDB
46:The place went on forever-like Costco or a chemistry lecture. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
47:Chemists all agree on the fundamental facts of chemistry. ~ Richard C Carrier, #NFDB
48:The first serious applications were in triterpenoid chemistry. ~ Derek Barton, #NFDB
49:Then we'll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
50:Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
51:I invented chemistry with you. Everything else is just pretend. ~ Leisa Rayven, #NFDB
52:The chemistry involved made everything Factory did quite special. ~ Peter Hook, #NFDB
53:Over a year later and the chemistry was still as powerful as ever. ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
54:I guess chemistry always changes when you play with someone else. ~ Brad Mehldau, #NFDB
55:There's no way you can create a chemistry where none exists. ~ Michael Parkinson, #NFDB
56:The two of them had a strange chemistry, like ammonia and bleach. ~ Molly Harper, #NFDB
57:You can tell if someone's into you. You can feel the chemistry. ~ Bradley Cooper, #NFDB
58:The moment we rationalize chemistry, we risk losing it forever. ~ Jennifer Probst, #NFDB
59:We all teach ... the chemistry of Lavoisier and Gay-Lussac. ~ Marcellin Berthelot, #NFDB
60:We define organic chemistry as the chemistry of carbon compounds. ~ August Kekule, #NFDB
61:Chemistry is you touching my arm and it setting fire to my mind. ~ Nayyirah Waheed, #NFDB
62:Hatred plays the same part in government as acid in chemistry. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
63:I dropped chemistry. I practically blew up the lab in college. ~ Patricia Cornwell, #NFDB
64:Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
65:We try to find chemistry; we don't do a lot of situational baseball. ~ Dean Martin, #NFDB
66:I have always had a certain song in my head, a certain chemistry of sounds. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
67:The chemistry between these three is phenomenal. — Christine Reese ~ Scarlett Avery, #NFDB
68:Some subjects mixed well with weed, but Chemistry wasn’t one of them. ~ Tom Perrotta, #NFDB
69:There's no such thing as emotion.
It's only body chemistry in action. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
70:Chemistry: that most excellent child of intellect and art. ~ Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, #NFDB
71:Every practice, every film session, every game will help our chemistry. ~ LeBron James, #NFDB
72:Good sexual chemistry is fundamental to a vibrant intimate relationship. ~ John Friend, #NFDB
73:I have no-fail chemistry. A guy turns me on, he's the wrong one for me. ~ Linda Barnes, #NFDB
74:Sometimes you fail your chemistry test and other times it's explosive. ~ Bruce Campbell, #NFDB
75:When you read about chemistry and physics, you want to do them too. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
76:You don't buy chemistry, nor do you manufacture it, it is what it is. ~ Stephen A Smith, #NFDB
77:If you're in love and there's that chemistry, that's what it's all about. ~ Sanaa Lathan, #NFDB
78:I think Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen have a lot of chemistry between them. ~ April Bowlby, #NFDB
79:I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry. ~ Amy Hempel, #NFDB
80:You know it's right when you feel this undeniable connection and chemistry. ~ Ali Larter, #NFDB
81:Both of his parents were firm believers in better living through chemistry. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
82:This isn't just chemistry. It's the whole periodic table." ~ Kelly MoranCain ~ Kelly Moran, #NFDB
83:The fact that you're friends doesn't necessarily equate to great chemistry. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
84:With some people, chemistry never fades. Perhaps for some, it intensifies. ~ Lauren Blakely, #NFDB
85:Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
86:In marriage, as in chemistry, opposites have often an attraction. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, #NFDB
87:We had a magnetic chemistry, as if we’d known each other in another lifetime. ~ Dannika Dark, #NFDB
88:Babe, your in trouble if you think you need a kiss to feel the chemistry. ~ Shannyn Schroeder, #NFDB
89:There is extraordinary chemistry that exists in long-term relationships ~ Jay Conrad Levinson, #NFDB
90:Chemistry on film is like chemistry in real life, it's either there or it isn't. ~ Sanaa Lathan, #NFDB
91:panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
92:Teamwork creates synergy and chemistry. We become unbreakable and believable. ~ Karen Kingsbury, #NFDB
93:History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
94:How could I let some stupid chemistry in my body override my self-preservation? ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
95:... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
96:I think chemistry is about not acting, but reacting, and not talking, but listening. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
97:Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
98:At Harvard I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math. ~ William Standish Knowles, #NFDB
99:Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history. ~ David Chang, #NFDB
100:I firmly believe that you can't manufacture chemistry with anyone, let alone a kid. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
101:Nature is one. It is not divided into physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics. ~ Albert Szent Gyorgyi, #NFDB
102:chemistry
is
you
touching my arm
and
it
setting fire to my mind. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,#NFDB
103:I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
104:No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry. ~ Michael Polanyi, #NFDB
105:Chemistry is you touching my arm and it setting fire to my mind"
Nayyirah Waheed ~ Nayyirah Waheed,#NFDB
106:Chemistry was a terrible thing, sometimes it simply sparked between the wrong people ~ Natasha Anders, #NFDB
107:There’s something in our chemistry,” I spoke softly, “that is utterly explosive.” His ~ Fisher Amelie, #NFDB
108:All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
109:Chemistry is like anything in life. The more you look for it, the harder it is to find. ~ Lauren Layne, #NFDB
110:I love Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats,' about the chemistry of food. It's really thoughtful. ~ Ina Garten, #NFDB
111:I think that all the years of exposure to amps and electricity has altered my body chemistry. ~ Iggy Pop, #NFDB
112:It was chemistry, not magic. No elevated C-peptide meant that the insulin wasn’t human. ~ Charles Graeber, #NFDB
113:Sometimes chemistry does the trick, and other times, you have to forge that with the people. ~ Aaron Tveit, #NFDB
114:When you play with someone you can feel the chemistry with, just the first show is already magic. ~ Hiromi, #NFDB
115:You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally. ~ Weike Wang, #NFDB
116:Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry! ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
117:If a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
118:So what if we have chemistry. Chemistry doesn't miraculously turn bad boys into good ones. ~ Simone Elkeles, #NFDB
119:Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
120:Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
121:The moment you change your perception is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body. ~ Bruce H Lipton, #NFDB
122:Chemistry wasn't something you could just create anyway; it was either there or it wasn't. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
123:In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics. ~ James Rainwater, #NFDB
124:...the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
125:Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
126:When you have chemistry with a potential hire, they will most likely become a great employee. ~ Barbara Corcoran, #NFDB
127:When you work with somebody you have chemistry with, it's easy and it's fun. You hardly call it work. ~ Joe Lando, #NFDB
128:During my McGill years, I took a number of math courses, more than other students in chemistry. ~ Rudolph A Marcus, #NFDB
129:In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth. ~ Jack W Szostak, #NFDB
130:I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set. ~ Martin Lewis Perl, #NFDB
131:I had D minuses in chemistry and all of the sciences, and now I'm known as a molecular gastronomist. ~ Grant Achatz, #NFDB
132:We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
133:I think it's hard to convince an audience of some sort of chemistry if you really don't get along. ~ Michiel Huisman, #NFDB
134:To retain my fascination with chemistry, I have had to change my research fields about every 10 years. ~ Donald Cram, #NFDB
135:If you have some magical chemistry that actually find the music you make compelling, that is a big bonus. ~ Geddy Lee, #NFDB
136:Perfume can be good . . . especially if you get one that goes with your chemistry." - Adrian Ivashkov ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
137:This is a technology where without external input, you create a chemistry of blissfulness within you. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
138:But I think my mistakes became the chemistry for my miracles. I think that my tests became my testimonies. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
139:He hadn’t learned much in chemistry, but he knew this: he was a particle and others around him reacted. ~ James Morris, #NFDB
140:I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
141:In 1960, I went to St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964. ~ John E Walker, #NFDB
142:And while looks deteriorated with time, a great personality and great chemistry only strengthened. ~ Douglas E Richards, #NFDB
143:Every aspect of the world today - even politics and international relations - is affected by chemistry. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
144:If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics? ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
145:I wanted sex to feel the way it had felt with him. Wild. Uninhibited. A perfect fit, perfect chemistry. ~ Beth Harbison, #NFDB
146:The chemistry of making the songs is often about being inspired by each other and responding intuitively. ~ Joe Goddard, #NFDB
147:When two characters or two actresses are together for a while there is bound to be chemistry developing. ~ Joan Van Ark, #NFDB
148:You can't fake some of this chemistry, even when you get a guy and a girl and they've got to be together. ~ Mike Binder, #NFDB
149:Chemistry is a funny thing, miss. Sometimes those who are experiencing it aren't always aware they are. ~ Dakota Cassidy, #NFDB
150:In the case of Five-O, I believe it was a combination of many ingredients - timing, chemistry, Hawaii. ~ James MacArthur, #NFDB
151:Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan; you just hope for it. ~ David E Kelley, #NFDB
152:Physical attraction is half the battle, you have to have chemistry before you worry about compatibility. ~ Helena Hunting, #NFDB
153:Saying the Bible is not a book about science is like saying a cookbook is not a book about chemistry. ~ Robert J Marks II, #NFDB
154:Chemistry is important. If you like your teammates, it's going to be easier to play with them on the court. ~ Kevin Durant, #NFDB
155:There certainly is such a thing as screen chemistry, although I don't believe you find it frequently. ~ Olivia de Havilland, #NFDB
156:Chemistry is so important in a great kiss. You can act your way through anything, but its hard with a kiss. ~ Rachel McAdams, #NFDB
157:My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry. ~ Vilfredo Pareto, #NFDB
158:The only things stopping me today are: genetics, lack of will, income, brain chemistry and external events. ~ Eddie Pepitone, #NFDB
159:Their chemistry was a thing of erotic beauty, his sexual experience a weapon against which she had no defense. ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
160:I have to keep reminding myself -- this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
161:Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use. ~ Janine Benyus, #NFDB
162:Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There’s no fooling a taste bud, in my experience. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
163:Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
164:For me, the original Guns N' Roses is the embodiment of a certain kind of chemistry that really couldn't be duplicated. ~ Slash, #NFDB
165:In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store. ~ Jack Steinberger, #NFDB
166:Look at the world, Georg, look at the world before you've filled yourself with too much physics and chemistry. ~ Jostein Gaarder, #NFDB
167:There had been an energy between Kade and me, an attraction and chemistry that was both compelling and dangerous. ~ Tiffany Snow, #NFDB
168:Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. ~ Donald Cram, #NFDB
169:Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love. ~ Edward Hoagland, #NFDB
170:What is like chemistry?"
"Well. Life."
"It's an outrageous farce, Oliver, with an incompetent producer... ~ William Golding,#NFDB
171:Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
172:As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly. Chemistry ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
173:If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
174:I think chemistry is finding something you love about a person and then transfering it to an in love kind of thing. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
175:Since that day I saw you in chemistry class with thatt canary yellow shirt, I wanted to make every day Christmas for you. ~ A S King, #NFDB
176:I've started to think it must just be chemistry, in which case we're looking for the Shift and we haven't found it yet. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
177:Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that? ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
178:Her mind was so strong that she was able to convince her brain to reverse the chemistry meant to dissolve her memories. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
179:Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life. ~ Randy Schekman, #NFDB
180:When you encourage someone, it literally changes their brain chemistry to be able to perform... sends fuel to the brain. ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
181:Their chemistry is intoxicating. Their power exchange is exhilarating. And the sex leaves them both absolutely exhausted. ~ Tracy Wolff, #NFDB
182:The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
183:Geology differs from physics, chemistry, and biology in that the possibilities for experiment are limited. ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, #NFDB
184:He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
185:In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants. ~ Rhoda Janzen, #NFDB
186:You have to make a decision. You have to believe. Once you start doubting, you change your brain chemistry and you're done. ~ Tim Noakes, #NFDB
187:In inorganic chemistry the radicals are simple; in organic chemistry they are compounds—that is the sole difference. ~ Jean Baptiste Dumas, #NFDB
188:Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
189:Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was the closest that business has ever come to resembling a child’s chemistry experiment. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
190:Some of the greatest relationship films of all time, the two stars have hated each other, but mostly you see that chemistry. ~ Baz Luhrmann, #NFDB
191:You've got a chemistry class; I want a piece of your mind; You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine. ~ Elvis Costello, #NFDB
192:BOTOLPHS (pl.n) Huge benign tumours which archdeacons and old chemistry teachers affect to wear on the sides of their noses. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
193:We are not only warming the ocean and the planet as a whole, but we are also acidifying the ocean and changing its chemistry. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
194:Applied physics and chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be capable of changing the mill itself. ~ Julian Huxley, #NFDB
195:The most important thing, when playing characters with chemistry, is being able to work off the other actor and be supported. ~ Tricia Helfer, #NFDB
196:For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
197:Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess. ~ John Cusack, #NFDB
198:I felt like Jason Behr and I had such a unique chemistry. He just walked in and we started reading together, it was just there ~ Shiri Appleby, #NFDB
199:Like the whole range of other human emotions, it's just a matter of chemistry. We are all nothing but machines made of flesh. ~ Donato Carrisi, #NFDB
200:The second I met Zac, I thought he was a really cool guy. It's hard not to have chemistry with someone who is so attractive. ~ Vanessa Hudgens, #NFDB
201:I woke up to the world of science when my high school chemistry teacher introduced me to the elegantly ordered periodic table. ~ Isadore Singer, #NFDB
202:My life is just like Breaking Bad except instead of a chemistry teacher I'm just a guy and instead of making meth I don't do much. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
203:The other thing I remember from the chemistry lab is stuff about pressure. Pressure turns coal into diamonds. Pressure does things. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
204:I was approaching the age of 40 with a substantial publication record, but had not yet held any position in a chemistry department. ~ John Pople, #NFDB
205:By the time The Band did The Last Waltz, the chemistry had changed, and it wasn't a thrill anymore to live that studio kind of life. ~ Levon Helm, #NFDB
206:Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it. ~ Adam Sandler, #NFDB
207:The country which is in advance of the rest of the world in chemistry will also be foremost in wealth and in general prosperity. ~ William Ramsay, #NFDB
208:The ocean governs the climate and the weather, it is taking care of the temperature and it is shaping the chemistry of our planet. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
209:The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
210:Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry. ~ Robert Boyle, #NFDB
211:[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile. ~ Edward Teller, #NFDB
212:I mean, there's chemistry in life and there's acting chemistry. I'm not saying they're the same thing, but they're as mysterious. ~ David Duchovny, #NFDB
213:It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
214:There is no true understanding of Biology without Chemistry. And there's no true understanding of Chemistry without Physics. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
215:Devotion is the spark that can fire up your chemistry and energy to such a level that it creates an explosion of ecstasy within you. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
216:During a movie, chemistry is so important, and yet they just assume actors can fake their way through it. That doesn't always work. ~ Rachel McAdams, #NFDB
217:I'd love to be a mad scientist who plays around with chemistry, and solves all the world's problems and creates a few of them himself. ~ Kellan Lutz, #NFDB
218:I’m smart enough to know that you feel it, too. This isn’t just heat, it’s a goddamned conflagration. Not chemistry, but nuclear fission. ~ J Kenner, #NFDB
219:The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
220:It was the chemistry that caused this lifting of the spirits. Chemistry lifted you up out of the mud and flung you up among the stars. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
221:We've all seen great actors and actresses who are missing a certain chemistry. And it's not about getting along or not getting along. ~ Johnny Galecki, #NFDB
222:If she thought he’d forgotten about the chemistry they had…she was out of her ever-loving mind. It wasn’t just a spark. It was a fire. ~ Sidney Halston, #NFDB
223:I realized I need a certain kind of chemistry and a certain kind of look to be into someone, and like 1 percent of the population has it. ~ Jen Kirkman, #NFDB
224:I think Ace is a great guitarist, and with the four original members of KISS, there's a magic and chemistry that you just can't touch. ~ Vinnie Vincent, #NFDB
225:Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy? ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
226:The chemistry of life is an aquatic chemistry. We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us. ~ Peter Godfrey Smith, #NFDB
227:Why do we always fight?” she whispered.
“You know why.” Yeah, she did. “It’s science.” “Combustible chemistry,” he agreed. “Dangerous. ~ Jill Shalvis,#NFDB
228:I would say chemistry between two people is very powerful. You have to fight to keep it, but if you don't have it, you can't manufacture it. ~ Diane Lane, #NFDB
229:He was like a long beaker in chemistry class, and the top was always bubbling over because some interesting process was taking place inside ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
230:The Argentine tango is very special to me because it's full of sensuality. The chemistry between the man and woman is absolutely stunning. ~ Gilles Marini, #NFDB
231:Every time I sat in a chemistry lesson I thought, what am I doing this for? I don't ever want to be in a job that involves a Bunsen burner.' ~ Simon Cowell, #NFDB
232:Apparently there’s a right and wrong answer in chemistry, whereas in psychology, you can say whatever you want as long as you write five pages, ~ Lisa Rogak, #NFDB
233:If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics. ~ Magnus Pyke, #NFDB
234:Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
235:A movie is the product of the chemistry of the people that make it. Whatever that core group of people is, that becomes the DNA of the movie. ~ Doug Sweetland, #NFDB
236:I have always believed that chemistry can't be created between two people. You either have it or you don't. The script can only enhance it. ~ Deepika Padukone, #NFDB
237:I saw you the morning after you met him. You were oozing with so much chemistry you could have recited the periodic table of elements backward. ~ Tawna Fenske, #NFDB
238:The thing about chemistry, it's sort of you get along with a person and then sort of if the movie does well, then you have great chemistry. ~ Jennifer Aniston, #NFDB
239:They [Mike Tyson and Todd Phillips] actually struck up a really pretty incredible chemistry, those two, and I think they really trusted each other. ~ Ed Helms, #NFDB
240:Why don't we have the chemistry that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet had in Titanic? I'll tell you one reason: Because we're not in a movie! ~ Scott Disick, #NFDB
241:Your sexual attributes are simply chemistry and setups within your DNA. They are given by agreement as gifts for you to experience in this life. ~ Lee Carroll, #NFDB
242:A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch, #NFDB
243:Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology. ~ Edward Thorndike, #NFDB
244:Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
245:We learned early on that we had chemistry and I was so grateful for that. It's like one of the few magical things about film that still exists. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
246:Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
247:. . . and there was for a moment an unbreakable bond between us: the eternal bond of chemistry.
I glowed with all the fire of a newborn galaxy. ~ Alan Bradley,#NFDB
248:In fact, every kind of pleasantness that we experience—whether peace or joy or ecstasy—is a kind of chemistry. The yogic system has always known this. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
249:I had no say in the matter. It was simple chemistry. A primal attraction that couldn’t be controlled or turned off simply because I willed it so. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
250:- It's been going so well. We have a wonderful time in class, and I can feel the chemistry between you.
- That's because it's chemistry class. ~ Alex Flinn,#NFDB
251:Yoga is a way to produce a chemistry of blissfulness. Once you are blissful by your own nature, you can deal with outside situations effortlessly. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
252:Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%. ~ Brad Feld, #NFDB
253:I do not know if I am mistaken, but it seems that one can obtain more truths, important to Humanity, from Chemistry than from any other Science. ~ Samuel Hahnemann, #NFDB
254:In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry. ~ Mark Hyman M D, #NFDB
255:It's like playing tennis, you play a different rally with different people. Every actor is different and the chemistry between actors is different. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB
256:Students judge how well they might do in a chemistry course from knowing how peers, who performed comparably to them in physics, fared in chemistry ~ Albert Bandura, #NFDB
257:The hallmark of addiction is that it changes your brain chemistry. It actually affects that part of your brain that's responsible for judgment. ~ Michael Botticelli, #NFDB
258:Beadle believed that genetics were inseparable from chemistry-more precisely, biochemistry. They were, he said, "two doors leading to the same room." ~ Warren Weaver, #NFDB
259:Chemistry begins in the stars. The stars are the source of the chemical elements, which are the building blocks of matter and the core of our subject. ~ Peter Atkins, #NFDB
260:In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it. ~ Joseph Louis Gay Lussac, #NFDB
261:Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
262:It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend. ~ Steve L pez, #NFDB
263:Something that chemistry supplies are very good for." When he gave me an odd look, I unwrapped a Bunsen burner and twirled it in the light. "Making bombs. ~ Lia Habel, #NFDB
264:It's the rare happening when actors get together and you have chemistry, connection, just something that works, that's bigger than what's on the page. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
265:My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains. ~ Beth Orton, #NFDB
266:The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain. ~ Bill McKibben, #NFDB
267:I smile, bigger than I'm sure I ever have before, and his lips are on mine, and if this isn't the best kind of chemistry, I don't know what is. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, #NFDB
268:You are done for — a living dead man — not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
269:Ever since [that day], a small uncertainty had buzzed between us.It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise, until now. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
270:It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
271:You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
272:I think Jon Foo and my chemistry is incredible! Foo is a genuine introvert and I'm a genuine extrovert. We're the perfect ying and yang, on and off camera. ~ Justin Hires, #NFDB
273:It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
274:My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage. ~ Kenneth G Wilson, #NFDB
275:That chemistry that we had [with Fred Savage] is very, very hard to find. We were lucky to have those 22 episodes [of The Grinder]. I'm unendingly proud of it. ~ Rob Lowe, #NFDB
276:The brain chemistry that drives the addict to seek pleasure beyond the point of satiety is similar, whether the user favours Jack Daniels or Jack-in-the-Box. ~ Vera Tarman, #NFDB
277:Habit, in fact, was what propelled his life forward. Though he no longer believed in a perfect community, nor felt the warmth of chemistry between people. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
278:Intelligence plus experience creates ideas, and experimentation with that form of chemistry-the contact of ideas with events-is the field of adult education. ~ Felix Morley, #NFDB
279:We discovered that we have a fun chemistry physically. Cameron [Diaz] has really long legs and a short torso, and I have a really long torso and shorter legs. ~ Leslie Mann, #NFDB
280:The answer is that each element corresponds to one solution of the main equation of quantum mechanics. The whole of chemistry emerges from a single equation. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
281:Perhaps I should notify Ms. Abernethy of a safety hazard in her chemistry classroom.Obviously I had inhaled hallucinatory gas just before she kicked me out. ~ Jennifer Echols, #NFDB
282:Spencer was searching for a woman interested in gold, inorganic chemistry, outdoor sex and the music of Bach. In short, he was looking for himself, only female. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
283:Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion. ~ Buzz Bissinger, #NFDB
284:Khem was an ancient name for the land of Egypt; and both the words alchemy and chemistry are a perpetual reminder of the priority of Egypt's scientific knowledge. ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
285:No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
286:Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke. ~ Joseph Silk, #NFDB
287:Real love starts as chemistry, builds into friendship, and blossoms into something so magical that it makes everything else feel worthwhile, even the bad parts. ~ Auryn Hadley, #NFDB
288:Sometimes I overtinker, which is something wrong with my brain chemistry. But in figuring out why I do that, maybe I'll make myself a better person. I doubt it. ~ John Goodman, #NFDB
289:When I met Dre, N.W.A. didn't exist, nor did Michel'le. And I think we had a chemistry. When started working on my stuff, we created something that was phenomenal. ~ Michel le, #NFDB
290:I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. ~ James E Lovelock, #NFDB
291:Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper. ~ George P lya, #NFDB
292:Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper. ~ George Polya, #NFDB
293:Well, I was always... I used to get 100% in physics and chemistry and mathematics (well, maybe a couple of points off in mathematics), and that was in high school. ~ James Doohan, #NFDB
294:If you've got good chemistry at the top, it's an enormous help. It's easy to have good chemistry with some, not so easy with others. With [Robert Mugabe], for example. ~ Bob Hawke, #NFDB
295:I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
296:My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set. ~ Rudolph A Marcus, #NFDB
297:William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn’t been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her. ~ Joshilyn Jackson, #NFDB
298:A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
299:In God’s garden, we will continue to blossom differently. And in that difference, we find a chemistry and a harmony, a spark across the gap, that consumes us all. ~ Terryl L Givens, #NFDB
300:Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. ~ Richard Ernst, #NFDB
301:To be sexy means to have that special chemistry that arouses others, no matter what you look like. Energy and confidence play a big part, and great skin doesn't hurt. ~ Dian Hanson, #NFDB
302:Your chemistry high school teacher lied to you when they told you that there was such a thing as a vacuum, that you could take space and move every particle out of it. ~ Adam Riess, #NFDB
303:In organic chemistry there exist certain types which are conserved even when, in place of hydrogen, equal volumes of chlorine, of bromine, etc. are introduced. ~ Jean Baptiste Dumas, #NFDB
304:It is the body, he thinks, not the mind. It is the blood, the chemistry that counts. In a few more minutes he is feeling much better about himself and about the world. ~ Ian McGuire, #NFDB
305:The acting thing is so beyond my control. Acting isn't mine. You're like a tiny piece in this big, corporate mechanism that needs chemistry and divine intervention. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
306:Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
307:Here are more quotes about chemistry and famous quotations made by chemists relating to their science. There's no way you can create a chemistry where none exists. ~ Michael Parkinson, #NFDB
308:I learned easily and had time to follow my inclination for sports (light athletics and skiing) and chemistry, which I taught myself by reading all textbooks I could get. ~ Robert Huber, #NFDB
309:I've always appreciated working with people I have chemistry with, who are friends, and where you feel that the work is growing while you are getting to know each other better. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
310:Not just my body. It’s more than that. Some parts spark. Others melt. A flux of chemistry and catastrophe, the same compulsive need that keeps bringing us back together. ~ Leisa Rayven, #NFDB
311:Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
312:I know that sometimes the chemistry just isn't there between the model, photographer, hair and make-up. It's nobody's fault and you just have to do better next time. ~ Linda Evangelista, #NFDB
313:I started out as a molecules kid. In high school and early college I loved chemistry, but I gradually shifted toward physics, which seemed cleaner - odorless, in fact. ~ Leon M Lederman, #NFDB
314:I can’t help it; this isn’t like you at all. I know the blood exchange changes things—including mood and body chemistry—but this is beyond any kind of scientific explanation. ~ J A Saare, #NFDB
315:Why was life so unfair that the one guy she felt uncontrollable chemistry with ---even when they weren't even touching ---was the only guy she had to keep her hands off? ~ Ophelia London, #NFDB
316:I really wanted to be a doctor, until my freshman year of college when I realized that while I was good at chemistry and biology, I really wasn't feeling challenged by it. ~ Marissa Mayer, #NFDB
317:My selection process is based on “three Cs”: first character, then competence, and finally chemistry with me and with the rest of the team. Character. Competence. Chemistry. ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
318:The good thing about having chemistry is, when you get to the improv section of a scene, you've got somebody to feed off. It can go on and on and on, and the sky's the limit. ~ Kevin Hart, #NFDB
319:Dean Di Laurentis is in my blood now. I didn’t expect the intense sexual chemistry between us, but it’s here, and it’s addictive, and I don’t know how I can ever give it up. ~ Elle Kennedy, #NFDB
320:I did help to set up an undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry and made progress in modelling and analysing pharmacological activity at the tissue level, my new passion. ~ James Black, #NFDB
321:Is there something wrong with daydreaming? Whether you're lost in a fairy tale or in a theory on chemistry, daydreaming about possibilities is rather enjoyable, in my view. ~ Kieran Kramer, #NFDB
322:Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul's School. ~ E C Bentley, #NFDB
323:That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
324:Housekeeping comprises the ability to find, evaluate, and use information about nutrition, cooking, chemistry and biology, health, comfort, laundry, cleaning, and safety. ~ Cheryl Mendelson, #NFDB
325:Scientists still use the term ‘organic chemistry’, even though we now know that the laws of chemistry are the same whether a molecule is located inside or outside an organism. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
326:I always say that chemistry is something impossible to manufacture. It's either there or it isn't. The fact that you're friends doesn't necessarily equate to great chemistry. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
327:It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
328:People don't have a standard reaction. People aren't a chemistry experiment you can tinker with until the proportions are just right. People are terrifying that way. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, #NFDB
329:Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
330:You can make low-budget film as long as there is something compelling about the characters. There is a believability in the chemistry and a likeability amongst the characters. ~ Mark McGrath, #NFDB
331:I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up. ~ Maya Lin, #NFDB
332:Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
333:There might be a lot of physical chemistry within a couple, but without the compatibility of life philosophy and interests then the relationship will likely not be long-lasting. ~ John Friend, #NFDB
334:Chemistry, in its application to animals and vegetables. Endeavours jointly with physiology to enlighten us respecting the mysterious processes and sources of organic life. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
335:I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
336:Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. ~ Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great (p. 256), #NFDB
337:Desire is chemistry. We're all just bags of charged atoms walking around bumping into each other. My electrons went seriously haywire for his tonight, though. Particles collided. ~ Elle Kennedy, #NFDB
338:The documents were in English—sort of—but the language was so convoluted that it was beginning to give her a headache. It made for even duller reading than her chemistry text. ~ Francine Pascal, #NFDB
339:Bashful=Spanish, Miss Gardenia
Doc=Psychology, Mr. Wang
Happy=Chemistry 2, Mr. Durbin
Dopey=English Lit., Mr. Purcell
Dippy=Math, Mrs. Craig
Dumbass=PE, Coach Crater ~ Lisa McMann,#NFDB
340:How do you create chemistry? If only I knew that! Some people say it's a natural thing that you have with someone, and maybe it is to do with that, but I think you can work on it. ~ Karen Gillan, #NFDB
341:I don't think it's blowing my own horn to say the show is not as good. There was chemistry there that took years and years to build and now that's gone. The commentary is lacking. ~ Jerry Lawler, #NFDB
342:If you are obliged to neglect any thing, let it be your chemistry. It is the least useful and the least amusing to a country gentleman of all the ordinary branches of science. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
343:Sometimes you have go into a movie and develop a certain type of chemistry with your co-stars. Sometimes it can click from "Hello" and other times it takes a few weeks to develop that. ~ The Miz, #NFDB
344:Chemistry is like an indefinable thing. When it comes to people playing your best friend or your parents or anything like that, there's always different kind of element to chemistry. ~ Emma Stone, #NFDB
345:He’s a lovely guy, but there’s no spark between us whatsoever. It just goes to show, that even with all their fancy assessment tools, the government can’t legislate for chemistry. ~ Siobhan Davis, #NFDB
346:I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs. ~ Robert B Laughlin, #NFDB
347:I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
348:And, I just can't shake this feeling I have when I'm around him. The chemistry, The electricity I feel when he's close to me or touches me, makes me feel more alive than I've ever felt ~ J B McGee, #NFDB
349:Earth would stand out as strange and perturbed, with something in the air that geology and chemistry alone could not explain, with some huge ongoing, active chemical disturbance. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
350:The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
351:Dating is a social brain teaser, as it requires constantly changing ratios of intimacy and distance, an erotic mental cha-cha choreographed by chemistry, insight, and fear. ~ Marilyn Suzanne Miller, #NFDB
352:It does not matter how sternly you tell yourself that the crippling paranoia of the small hours of the night is due solely to body chemistry. You still feel absolutely miserable. ~ Victoria Clayton, #NFDB
353:I've got this weird body chemistry that I don't like to get high. I'm not going to say I never tried drugs. I tried most everything. I didn't try injectables. But I didn't like it. ~ Linda Ronstadt, #NFDB
354:The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA. ~ Michael Polanyi, #NFDB
355:I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry. ~ Roald Hoffmann, #NFDB
356:Leaving England was a painful decision, and we still have some regrets about it. However, at that time, the research environment for theoretical chemistry was clearly better in the U.S. ~ John Pople, #NFDB
357:There's a Universe Instrument, where we apply Hip-Hop to astronomy, and we flush out the chemistry of Hip-Hop. We also flushed out the astronomy, to see where Hip-Hop is read in the stars. ~ KRS One, #NFDB
358:Creatively, I thought we were still viable and could do more records. But our working relationship just wasn't happening at all, and our chemistry as people broke down because of that. ~ Matt Cameron, #NFDB
359:Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
360:A band's only unique thing is its chemistry, especially if none of you are prodigious players or particularly handsome. The one thing you have is your uniqueness, so we hold on to that. ~ Chris Martin, #NFDB
361:Education is learning more than it is being taught. It's the chemistry of curiosity exposed to information. In that sense all of life is potentially school. And even I can pass that. ~ Bob Guccione Jr, #NFDB
362:I'm presently incarcerated. Convicted of a crime I didn't even commit. Hah! "Attempted murder"? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they? ~ Matt Groening, #NFDB
363:She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ... ~ John Updike, #NFDB
364:Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear that biological evolution could not have occurred. ~ Richard Smalley, #NFDB
365:In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me. ~ Burton Richter, #NFDB
366:Shame is real pain. The importance of social acceptance and connection is reinforced by our brain chemistry, and the pain that results from social rejection and disconnection is real pain. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
367:Their chemistry at the Tavern had nearly set the place on fire. And she hadn't missed that tent situation under his pants earlier - an entire Boy Scout troop could've camped under there. ~ Elle Kennedy, #NFDB
368:When I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished - for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas. ~ Karl Barry Sharpless, #NFDB
369:Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
370:love, for instance. Everybody experiences it, craves it, requires it for his or her very existence, knows it’s there. But no one can explain it, break it down into physics and chemistry. ~ Rupert Isaacson, #NFDB
371:The conflict of chemistry we do not think reprehensible. If we could look at social conflict as neither good nor bad, but simply a fact, we should make great strides in our thinking. ~ Mary Parker Follett, #NFDB
372:Band chemistry is a tricky thing. If one guy isn't feeling right with the other guys, everything gets thrown off. When you get the personalities and the chemistry right, that's a grand slam. ~ Les Claypool, #NFDB
373:Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. So ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
374:Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion. ~ Betty Smith, #NFDB
375:He thought there was chemistry? Faith had always hated chemistry at school but if she’d known a sexy Australian was going to seduce her with it in the future she may have paid more attention. ~ Amy Andrews, #NFDB
376:In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry. ~ Jons Jacob Berzelius, #NFDB
377:Who are the farmer's servants? ... Geology and Chemistry, the quarry of the air, the water of the brook, the lightning of the cloud, the castings of the worm, the plough of the frost. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
378:God, you’re such and ass.”
I leaned in. “An ass that you have a shitload of chemistry with, like it or not. So whaddya you say? By day we fight like enemies, by night we fuck like warriors? ~ Vi Keeland,#NFDB
379:Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
380:Sometimes one of us will have a riff or a bass line from home but it really gels when we come together. We really have a strong special chemistry that we take advantage of when we get together. ~ Chad Smith, #NFDB
381:People wanted to see Rey Mysterio and PsIcosis in a match, and we had such a great chemistry. I don't think there was anyone at that time who could match what we were bringing to the table. ~ Oscar Gutierrez, #NFDB
382:The psychology degree is simply that I was a chemistry major, and they kept wanting the correct answer, whereas in psychology you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B. ~ Jon Stewart, #NFDB
383:But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects. ~ Kenichi Fukui, #NFDB
384:I think I infuse the music with a new passion. Part of this is because I have fallen in love: I am in love with the New York Philharmonic. The chemistry has just been right. Beyond expectation. ~ Lorin Maazel, #NFDB
385:One day scientists will more fully understand the chemistry and neuro-circuitry that differentiates love from lust. I couldn't begin to explain the mechanics, but I know that they feel differently. ~ Jim Goad, #NFDB
386:We would be glad to have your friend come here to study, but tell him that we teach Chemistry here and not Agricultural Chemistry, nor any other special kind of chemistry. ... We teach Chemistry. ~ Ira Remsen, #NFDB
387:And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Michael Polanyi, #NFDB
388:Brit: What's your major?
Alex: Chemistry. And yours?
Brit: Chemistry. Kiss me so we can see if we still have it. 'Cause you own my heart, my soul, and everything else in between. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
389:Chemistry was such a strange thing. I'd be willing to bet even Micah couldn't tell me why hundreds of men could leave me cold, while this one could string me along forever with only a smile. ~ Vicki Pettersson, #NFDB
390:If not through divine supervision, how do the atoms of modern chemistry, with their exactly reproducible, stable properties, emerge from equations that, fundamentally, are equations for change? ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
391:If you want to become a chemist, you will have to ruin your health. If you don't ruin your health studying, you won't accomplish anything these days in chemistry. Liebig's advice to Kekulé. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
392:If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
393:It just makes me wonder what subject you blame for talking to me every night.' I'm still settling on an answer for that one. Probably Chemistry. Jesus Christ. I can't believe I just wrote that. ~ Megan McCafferty, #NFDB
394:Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers. ~ Max Planck, #NFDB
395:We can be so heavily invested in our tales of sorrow and woe that we have no clue how much repeating that negative story creates the chemistry in our body mind that triggers the physical pain. ~ Catherine Carrigan, #NFDB
396:A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
397:Chemistry is a hard thing. I don't think you can force it, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have great chemistry outside of work. It's just something that sparks on screen or doesn't. ~ Tricia Helfer, #NFDB
398:For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
399:I've never understood the phrase they have chemistry before now. After all, everything is chemistry. Everything is combination and reaction. The atoms in by body align themselves with the atoms in his. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
400:The psychology degree comes from the fact that I was a chemistry major and they kept wanting the correct answer, whereas in psychology you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B. ~ Lisa Rogak, #NFDB
401:The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research. ~ Wilhelm Johannsen, #NFDB
402:Usually based on an economic agenda, white working-class voters don't buy into this whole biology-chemistry-abortion-gender agenda as much as they want more take-home pay. They want affordability. ~ Kellyanne Conway, #NFDB
403:Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
404:Chaitin proved that physical laws alone, for example, could not explain chemistry or biology, because the laws of physics contain drastically less information than do chemical or biological phenomena. ~ George Gilder, #NFDB
405:I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer. ~ Marcellin Berthelot, #NFDB
406:I think the locker room is a huge part of the football team and often is a part thats overlooked. The chemistry in your locker room has a lot to do with how youre going to go out there and perform. ~ Larry Fitzgerald, #NFDB
407:In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
408:This means that we have here an entirely separate kind of chemistry for which the current tool we use is the electrometer, not the balance, and which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable. ~ Marie Curie, #NFDB
409:I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry? ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
410:I don't care how intelligent or attractive someone is, if he zaps your energy, he isn't for you. True chemistry is more than intellectual compatibility. Beyond surfaces, you must be intuitively at ease. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
411:I don’t care how intelligent or attractive someone is, if he zaps your energy, he isn’t for you. True chemistry is more than intellectual compatibility. Beyond surfaces, you must be intuitively at ease. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
412:If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.
But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life. ~ Tom Stoppard,#NFDB
413:It just makes me wonder what subject you blame for talking to me every night.'
I'm still settling on an answer for that one. Probably Chemistry.
Jesus Christ. I can't believe I just wrote that. ~ Megan McCafferty,#NFDB
414:To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
415:You won't see me writing about particle physics, or even planetary geology, or chemistry. I practically failed chemistry, and if I had to write a book in any of those areas, I don't think it would go well. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
416:How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry? ~ Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, #NFDB
417:Fine, I’ll give you some more time before I kiss you,” I say, relenting. But I want to make my intentions clear. “It’s gonna happen, though. There’s chemistry here, June. You can feel it, I know you can. ~ Sidney Halston, #NFDB
418:You know, people ask, "How does the chemistry happen?" It's like being in a bar when you're drunk. You see the person, and you don't know why, it just works. And it's like everything goes in slow-motion. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
419:All life is sorcery. In its very essence, the soul is magical, and each process of chemistry, of obeisance and cooperation, of surrender and of struggle—at every scale conceivable—is a consort of sorcery. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
420:When you work with a good actor, there is this natural rapport and chemistry that develops over time. That chemistry helps your characters come alive and makes the story of the film that much more convincing. ~ Aamir Khan, #NFDB
421:I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. ~ Sydney Brenner, #NFDB
422:The fragrance that suits me best is Romance by Ralph Lauren. It seems to blend into my chemistry, so it is nice and subtle. I don't like to be doused in scent. This one is feminine, fresh and a bit musky. ~ Joanne Froggatt, #NFDB
423:As a director and an actor, it is very difficult to say "this person was better than another person." I judge by chemistry of the actors but it is difficult being a judge. I will never bash any of the actors. ~ Tommy Wiseau, #NFDB
424:Everyone talks about the elusive thing with chemistry. If you have a romance on screen or anything, the first thing you have to do is become friends with the person. Its not necessarily about falling in love. ~ Seamus Dever, #NFDB
425:True love, and what it is, and how do you know what it is. Is it just chemistry, or is it years and years of commitment and being together and hanging in there building a history? And how do you find both? ~ Patricia Heaton, #NFDB
426:A German and two American scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for smashing the size barrier in optical microscopes, allowing researchers to see individual molecules inside living cells. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
427:In organic chemistry, we have learnt to derive from compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen, i.e. from the hydrocarbons, all other types of combinations, such as alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, acids, etc. ~ Otto Wallach, #NFDB
428:I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people. ~ Peter Carey, #NFDB
429:Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
430:Almost seventy-five percent of our leaders have come right out of Willow. These are people who have proven their character, competence, and chemistry fit while serving in volunteer positions within our ministry. ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
431:A man cannot be professor of zoölogy on one day and of chemistry on the next, and do good work in both. As in a concert all are musicians,-one plays one instrument, and one another, but none all in perfection. ~ Louis Agassiz, #NFDB
432:I think that there have been times, especially with writing songs, where you sit in a room with somebody, and they could be a very well-respected songwriter, but for whatever reason, the chemistry is just not right. ~ Dave Koz, #NFDB
433:Jung's move to investigate alchemy as premodern art/science before its separation into rhetoric versus chemistry was an effort to imagine a possible reunion or, at least, reclassification of art and science. ~ Craig Stephenson, #NFDB
434:Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. ~ Janine Benyus, #NFDB
435:High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study. ~ Kyle Chandler, #NFDB
436:I want to know where joy lives. I'd interview scientists, religious leaders and heads of state. I'd want to find out exactly what makes people happy. I'd want to look into the biology, the chemistry of the human brain. ~ Goldie, #NFDB
437:We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness. ~ Ellen Goodman, #NFDB
438:I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943. ~ John Pople, #NFDB
439:Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large. ~ Bill McKibben, #NFDB
440:Isn’t that funny, to think that the people who have lived in your daydreams for the past two weeks, the people whom you’ve drawn in your chemistry notebook, to think that those people might not even know who you are? ~ Leila Sales, #NFDB
441:In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more. ~ Jean Baptiste Dumas, #NFDB
442:From the moment the five of us leaned into our first song, we could all hear and feel that the fit was right. The chemistry was immediate, thunderous, and soulful. It was amazing and all of us recognized it instantly. ~ Duff McKagan, #NFDB
443:The heart and soul of sex is the physical heat it creates between two bodies. Sometimes playful, sometimes passionate, sometimes pure and sweet, this skin-to-skin connection renews your bond and strengthens chemistry. ~ Laura Berman, #NFDB
444:Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't. ~ Gertrude B Elion, #NFDB
445:Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences ~ Ilya Prigogine, #NFDB
446:Mental chemistry creates interest, Emotional chemistry Generates Affection, Physical chemistry generates desire, and Spiritual chemistry creates love. A soulmate includes all four...and I will not settle for anything less! ~ John Gray, #NFDB
447:I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine. ~ Brian Schmidt, #NFDB
448:New York police force seems like unlike any other in America and even the world. There's a very specific culture dynamic, a specific chemistry. There's almost a specific set of rules because of the city and the size of it. ~ Theo James, #NFDB
449:mysterious chemistry that sometimes developed between seemingly dissimilar men—each surprisingly recognizing in the other a deep-down, kindred soul, the two of them bobbing along alone and unappreciated in a sea of fools. ~ W E B Griffin, #NFDB
450:Our mating is chemistry and biology. My body, my blood, needs you on a fundamental level. You. Your body brings me peace, comfort. Your blood restores my immortality and humanity. But I wanted you before this, Shayla. ~ Laura Kaye, #NFDB
451:The whole art of making experiments in chemistry is founded on the principle: we must always suppose an exact equality or equation between the principles of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
452:If materialism is true, it seems to me that we cannot know that it is true. If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of logic. ~ John B S Haldane, #NFDB
453:I later realized that this is my view of passion: It is rooted in genuine friendship. Chemistry may be two strangers exchanging smoldering looks—but passion has to be able to survive at least a twenty-minute conversation! ~ Helen Simonson, #NFDB
454:Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet. ~ Seth Lloyd, #NFDB
455:Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we're near...when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
456:A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel. ~ John Carreyrou, #NFDB
457:Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
458:People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They're wrong. ... What comes first is a question, and you're already there. It's not nearly as involved as people make it out to be. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
459:A new study shows that American students are becoming less proficient in science, and if the trend continues, we will become a nation that's science and chemistry illiterate. And you thought a lot of meth labs are blowing up now? ~ Jay Leno, #NFDB
460:I’d study the science of you until I turned it into an art.
The way your atoms rub together.
Molecules colliding.
Chemistry building.
Explosions of heat and radiation burning
like a star at the end of the world. ~ Iain Thomas,#NFDB
461:My undergraduate degree was in history, and I wish I had been smart enough to really excel at maths, physics, chemistry or biology because... the voyagers and adventurers and real contributors - that's where they come from. ~ Michael Moritz, #NFDB
462:The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better. ~ Nathan Myhrvold, #NFDB
463:You wouldn't care if I was dead. Nobody'd care. That's all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me, just my damned body. And I'm damned and you're damned with your cock and your cleverness and your chemistry- ~ William Golding, #NFDB
464:Cellular pathology is not an end if one cannot see any alteration in the cell. Chemistry brings the clarification of living processes nearer than does anatomy. Each anatomical change must have been preceded by a chemical one. ~ Rudolf Virchow, #NFDB
465:Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
466:I'm aware of everything - it's my job - I keep up to speed, and I have a blessed memory. The brain chemistry I have is such that my memory is wonderful. And sometimes it's helpful, and other times it ends up being frustrating. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
467:It seemed to me that one should make an effort to banish artificial classifications from chemistry and begin to assign to each element the place it must occupy in the natural order by comparing it in succession to others. ~ Andre Marie Ampere, #NFDB
468:We create a standard for how we want to do things and everybody's got to buy into that standard or you really can't have any team chemistry. Mediocre people don't like high-achievers and high-achievers don't like mediocre people. ~ Nick Saban, #NFDB
469:Asbestos, EMFs, and CFCs have given us a degree of humility. When yesterday's "triumph of modern chemistry" turns out instead to be today's deadly threat to the global environment, it is legitimate to ask what else we don't know. ~ Denis Hayes, #NFDB
470:I got into magic because I got into alchemy. Which I got into because I was into chemistry, which I was learning about because I wanted to get better with botany, which I had taken up studying in an effort to grow some killer weed ~ Drew Hayes, #NFDB
471:It has pleased no less than surprised me that of the many studies whereby I have sought to extend the field of general chemistry, the highest scientific distinction that there is today has been awarded for those on catalysis. ~ Wilhelm Ostwald, #NFDB
472:Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other? ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
473:I knew about viscosity, but I’d heard about it in a course in physical chemistry, not in physics. Step by step, the questions I asked led me into the world of mechanical engineering. A reductionist path, yes, but a different one. ~ Steven Vogel, #NFDB
474:One wonders how people in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not. ~ Richard Evans Schultes, #NFDB
475:I just thought to my self, all of a sudden, that we had something in common. A natural chemistry, if you will. And I had a feeling that something big was going to happen. To both of us. That we were, in fact, meant to be together. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
476:Present-day science, conventional medicine, and the mindset of 'better living through chemistry' have delivered their results, and they are less an excellent. Essentially, due to poor results, these methods no longer reign supreme. ~ David Wolfe, #NFDB
477:For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. ~ Rupert Sheldrake, #NFDB
478:I looked down, unable to meet the intensity in Nat’s eyes. Tonight, my crush for Nat had moved beyond a crush. The chemistry between us was undeniable, and the more we clashed, the more we wanted each other." - Summer, Perfect Summer ~ Kailin Gow, #NFDB
479:I think the chemistry on the Orange set is extraordinary and I’m going to risk and say this: I think by virtue of the fact that there are not so many men, we are free to be absolutely authentic. There is a lot of freedom and trust. ~ Kate Mulgrew, #NFDB
480:It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
481:Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people an actor and a director. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in. ~ Ralph Fiennes, #NFDB
482:We do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. ~ Dimitar Sasselov, #NFDB
483:I have wished to see chemistry applied to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the making of bread, butter, cheese, soap, to the incubation of eggs, &c. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
484:I think Taj and Nina were better friends, because they get along, they have a lot of fun and they laugh. But it seems that Nina and Jack really hit it off. Nina really fell in love with Jack. there's a lot of chemistry between them! ~ Delta Goodrem, #NFDB
485:issue, as if that should stop us from living together. A marriage has to have some flaws, some unresolved issues, some conflicts that can be worked through. Hopefully long-term marriages move beyond chemistry to compatibility anyway. ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
486:Maybe some folks are alcoholics and others are just voluntary drunks. Maybe some folks drink due to body chemistry and others due to their lazy characters. Maybe some have drinking problems, while others have problems enough to drink. ~ George Jones, #NFDB
487:The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
488:Often if you are very, very close with someone, sometimes it does not read. In effect, your dynamic onstage is defused. You share too much onstage. There's sort of a blurring of behavior that doesn't read to the audience as chemistry. ~ Jessica Hecht, #NFDB
489:Activity is intelligence. We follow our information systems and we use our energy to get it done. And that's caused by a byproduct called matter. That's why I call it "energetic matter." And it's chemical matter. We are chemistry. ~ Horst Rechelbacher, #NFDB
490:There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
491:What you do on the inside effects your brain and chemistry and blood and DNA much more than anything you can do on the outside. I know many people who decide they will never be happy again. Never make money again. Never find romance again. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
492:I always hoped for this spark of chemistry and compatibility, a flash of clarity to let me know that this was the guy, this was the time, so I should leg go and enjoy myself. But it never came. And by no small coincidence, neither did I. ~ Molly Harper, #NFDB
493:What we mean when speaking of "myth" in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can't. ~ Thomas C Foster, #NFDB
494:You either have chemistry or you don't, but a lot of what attracts me is a guy's mind and humor and talent. I need to get to know all those things before I fall for someone. I'm not a one-night-stand kind of girl. I'm a relationship girl. ~ Nina Dobrev, #NFDB
495:The social environment interacts with brain chemistry. Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
496:Unlike optogenetics, where there are existing nonprofits that give away the DNA for free or at cost, expansion microscopy requires chemicals to be used, so having a company that makes the chemistry kit that anybody can use can save time. ~ Edward Boyden, #NFDB
497:We have concluded that the rocks here were once soaked in liquid water. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry. We've been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion. ~ Steve Squyres, #NFDB
498:But there was a cost. Being near Ethan was just... incendiary. Part animosity, part ridiculous chemistry, neither conducive to a peaceful home environment. And this was only my first night under his thumb. Not a good sign of things to come. ~ Chloe Neill, #NFDB
499:Cooperating the first time would’ve saved everyone a lot of time and effort,” he said. “Just think about all the things we would’ve missed out on had I done so. Our chemistry. Our witty banter.” I grinned at him. “Tell me true. You loved it. ~ K F Breene, #NFDB
500:Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative health consequences, the doctors found that constant stress can actually change the chemistry of a child’s brain. Stress, after ~ J D Vance, #NFDB
501:It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think not.” D’Arcy Thompson ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
502:Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
503:you must
put
healing on the list.
the grocery list.
the to do list.
the night list.
because
you are teaching
your
baby
the very same chemistry
that
took your eyes
and
heart when you were four. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,#NFDB
504:Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval forest full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter. ~ Friedrich Wohler, #NFDB
505:The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. ~ Johannes V Jensen, #NFDB
506:It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car. ~ Elon Musk, #NFDB
507:I want to fly a jet. I'd love to just be in the air and go mach 3 or mach 4. Or, I'd be an underwater salvager. I've always been fascinated with the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis. I love chemistry, also. That's why acting is so random for me! ~ Kellan Lutz, #NFDB
508:However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library. ~ Richard Ernst, #NFDB
509:I remember someone said to me, "Beware of instant chemistry with people, because a lot of time it's the recognition of something familiar," and for people who have a habit of getting into unhealthy relationships, that's usually a bad thing. ~ Gillian Jacobs, #NFDB
510:Through some strange and powerful principle of mental chemistry which she has never divulged, nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, that something which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
511:When you have strong chemistry with your own characters, and the ending is coming soon, it feels like a beautiful farewell. You don't want to leave them. You just want to keep it that way. You just want to pause that last moment forever. I do. ~ Alvi Syahrin, #NFDB
512:Let's get you into a room and conduct our own chemistry experiment," he said against my lips.
"Or maybe we'll just find a table to bend you over, since chemists do it on a table... periodically."
"Mmm. I love it when you talk nerdy to me. ~ Cindi Madsen,#NFDB
513:You can still have chemistry on screen without getting on with the person. But it just makes your job a lot easier if you don't have to gird your loins, if that's not quite the right phrase, every time you're going to do a scene with that person. ~ Hugh Dancy, #NFDB
514:Attraction and chemistry don't follow any logical rules. You're not the prettiest girl I've ever met, nor the smartest, nor the funniest. But you are the girl I've altered a peace treaty for, and you are the girl I'm spending the evening with. ~ Laura Thalassa, #NFDB
515:Look, Sage. I don't know much about chemistry or computer hacking or photosynthery, but this is something I've got a lot of experience with." I think he mean photosynthesis, but I didn't correct him. "Use my knowledge. Don't let it go to waste. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
516:I just didn’t want to be fixed. Whatever my real problems might be, I didn’t want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left? ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
517:People always ask me about my makeout scenes with him [Tyler Posey]. We joke around a lot and are like, ‘Oh, that was a sloppy one!’ But seriously, I don’t have to make an effort to have chemistry with him. He’s such a sweet guy and really loyal. ~ Crystal Reed, #NFDB
518:The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
519:Chemistry itself knows altogether too well that - given the real fear that the scarcity of global resources and energy might threaten the unity of mankind - chemistry is in a position to make a contribution towards securing a true peace on earth. ~ Kenichi Fukui, #NFDB
520:Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
521:Every person's body chemistry is different. The effect of one single drug that appeals to me might have a different effect on someone else. There's no way to tell what the perfect psychedelic drug would be, because it would be perfect for only you. ~ Ann Shulgin, #NFDB
522:Everything is better when you share it, I think. That flow of ideas between different people, the chaos of it all, makes life so exciting. And when someone new comes in, the chemistry changes and you see things in people you hadn’t seen before. ~ Liza Klaussmann, #NFDB
523:It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there. ~ Henry Cavill, #NFDB
524:My mom, she was, she studied chemistry. And later on she changed and majored, she changed later in her career, in her life and studied philosophy and then she did a perfect clash, connection between chemistry and philosophy and she became a witch. ~ Alfonso Cuaron, #NFDB
525:This may sound like a wild speculation, yet, judging from analogy, there may perhaps be within the planetary sphere an Entity Whose consciousness is as far removed from that of man as the consciousness of man is from that of the atom of chemistry. ~ Alice A Bailey, #NFDB
526:For women, it’s The Virgin Diet by JJ Virgin, which will challenge your rules about calories and exercise and show you that it’s not about how much you eat, but how you combine the right foods in the right order for your body’s “chemistry lab.” 6. ~ Vishen Lakhiani, #NFDB
527:No one can say, "Here is Biology, here Mathematics, here Philosophy." No one can point to Physics, or show us Chemistry. In reality no dotted lines divide History from Geography or Physics from Chemistry, or Philosophy from Linguistics, and so on. These ~ John Holt, #NFDB
528:You don't know if the actors are going to have chemistry until you actually start filming. They can get along, they can be friends for years, they can be hilarious as people, but you don't know if it'll actually work until the cameras start rolling. ~ Anne Fletcher, #NFDB
529:He downplayed the significance of technical knowledge in business. “I never felt the need of scientific knowledge, have never felt it. A young man who wants to succeed in business does not require chemistry or physics. He can always hire scientists.”32 ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
530:I think the most special thing about the chemistry is the intimate understanding of how to make each other laugh. At the end of the day, in order to portray a genuine relationship on camera, that's one of the most fundamental things that has to occur. ~ Drake Doremus, #NFDB
531:It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
532:For no. 1, it's great writing, super writing. The second thing is that it's great chemistry with all the actors. We just all got along from the very start. Very get-go, we all got along. We just - it was just like we were all meant to be there together. ~ Reba McEntire, #NFDB
533:In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
534:Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
535:She touched my back as she slipped past me, a simple gesture, one that probably meant nothing, but I felt it, felt her through the pads of her fingertips, through the cotton of my shirt. I’d never thought that chemistry between two people could be tangible. ~ Staci Hart, #NFDB
536:We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. ~ Peter Wohlleben, #NFDB
537:Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion. ~ James D Watson, #NFDB
538:If the chemistry is right between star and photographer and the geometry of the pictures pleases the star, often the two people end up with a long-term professional friendship during which they continue to work together and to produce highly personal images. ~ Eve Arnold, #NFDB
539:I love the chemistry that can be created onstage between the actors and the audience. It's molecular even, the energies that can go back and forth. I started in theater and when I first went into movies I felt that my energy was going to blow out the camera. ~ Glenn Close, #NFDB
540:What we call pure water at room temperature contains equal numbers of positive hydronium and negative hydroxyl groups, at a concentration that translates to a pH of 7 (a “power of hydrogen” of 10−7 moles of hydronium groups per liter, in chemistry terms). ~ Robert M Hazen, #NFDB
541:She got herself a boyfriend she wants us to meet. He's studying chemistry. A senior. She said that 3 or 4 times on the phone. Senior. Like it's supposed to mean something to me, as long as I been grown. Senior ain't nothing but a year. Young man's distinction. ~ Ravi Howard, #NFDB
542:The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
543:At one point I wanted to work for NASA and be an astrophysicist, so I did physics, math, and chemistry before realizing I probably wasn't quite smart enough to do that. But I am still hugely interested in cosmology and astrophysics. That is my geeky subject area. ~ Gemma Chan, #NFDB
544:We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
545:I am afraid I shall have to give up my trade; I am far too inert to keep up with organic chemistry, it is becoming too much for me, though I may boast of having contributed something to its development. The modern system of formulae is to me quite repulsive. ~ Friedrich Wohler, #NFDB
546:My interest in chemistry was started by reading Robert Kennedy Duncan's popular books while a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, so that after some delay when it was possible for me to go to college I had definitely decided to specialize in chemistry. ~ Wallace Carothers, #NFDB
547:Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry. ~ Johannes Peter Muller, #NFDB
548:Josh: St. Clair and Anna are one of those couples that seem like they were made for each other. Instant friendship, instant chemistry. He was obsessed with her from the moment they met. She was the only thing he ever wanted to talk about. Still is, actually. ~ Stephanie Perkins, #NFDB
549:A kiss with anyone, on or off camera, can be intimidating. I’ve been kissing for nearly two decades now, and I’m always convinced I’m not doing it right. Chemistry is so important in a great kiss. You can act your way through anything, but it’s hard with a kiss. ~ Rachel McAdams, #NFDB
550:In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.' ~ Hiram Maxim, #NFDB
551:Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
552:The chemistry and the comfort and trust between two people playing a love story l is key, and to have a friend that I could trust, and whose sensibilities I already understood, made it so much easier, and is a big part of why it all looks natural on screen. ~ Joseph Gordon Levitt, #NFDB
553:The competent critic of prose-style, experimental technique, or embroidery, must at least know how to write, experiment or sew. Whether or not he has also learned some psychology matters about as much as whether he has learned any chemistry, neurology or economics. ~ Gilbert Ryle, #NFDB
554:A study published in the October 22, 2014, issue of the journal Neuron suggests that the brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information. But curiosity is uncomfortable because it involves uncertainty and vulnerability. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
555:Children change a lot in terms of personality. Camaraderie that you feel with somebody might not be there a year later. That group might not have the same chemistry. So I completely understand why they're rushing into it, because they probably feel like they have to. ~ Mara Wilson, #NFDB
556:It is through this cultural life rather than through experimental encounter in a laboratory that we really come to know the elements individually, and it is a cause for sadness that most chemistry teaching does so little to acknowledge this rich existence. ~ Hugh Aldersey Williams, #NFDB
557:The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
558:How amazing it was, Holmes mentioned, that such a powerful substance, the chemistry of which was still not completely known, could be produced by the pharyngeal glands of the worker bee –creating queens from ordinary bee larvae, healing a multitude of mankind’s ills. ~ Mitch Cullin, #NFDB
559:I don't know how Angela will react to that, and this is why it's so hard telling the truth. People don't have a standard reaction. People aren't a chemistry experiment you can tinker with until the proportions are just right. People are terrifying that way. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, #NFDB
560:One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
561:Sir P. C. Roy’s History of Hindu Chemistry, in B. N. Seal’s Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus, in B. K. Sarkar’s Hindu Achievements in Exact Science and his The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, and in U. C. Dutt’s Materia Medica of the Hindus. 2 ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
562:Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
563:Reading, writing, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, physics, and more were all at one time deep occult secrets. Today, many of these things are taught to children before they begin school. THE OCCULTISM OF THE PAST BECOMES THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE. ~ Donald Michael Kraig, #NFDB
564:The chemistry was still there. To me, that was the biggest thing: Would the chemistry be there? Can we really go ahead and do this? And it was obvious within the first moment of plugging in the instruments that the magic was still there. It was a fantastic feeling. ~ Christine McVie, #NFDB
565:Wöhler’s experiment demolished vitalism. Organic and inorganic chemicals, he proved, were interchangeable. Biology was chemistry: perhaps even a human body was no different from a bag of busily reacting chemicals—a beaker with arms, legs, eyes, brain, and soul. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
566:Chemistry is one of these crazy things you can't teach or learn or you can't fake. You go in hoping it will work, hope that you will connect with the other actors. I was fortunate on 'Modern Family' and 'The Procession.' They are great people, very easy to like. ~ Jesse Tyler Ferguson, #NFDB
567:Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer—you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman—or a plum pudding. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
568:Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
569:It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
570:I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary laboratories of an industrial research institute. ~ George Andrew Olah, #NFDB
571:Similarly for marking exercises, quantitative exercises, maybe not so much in mathematics, but certainly problem sets in physics, chemistry, and engineering and things like that where answers and methods are clear cut, absolutely. I would like to see that done online. ~ David Gelernter, #NFDB
572:If you want to be an anthropologist, you need to study physical anthropology specialized in bones. If you want to be a forensic chemist, get a degree in chemistry. Do you want to do DNA work? Get a degree in microbiology. And do well. Study hard and go to graduate school. ~ Kathy Reichs, #NFDB
573:My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
574:My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
575:Chemistry ceases to improve when one element is found from which all others are deductible. Physics ceases to progress when one force is found of which all others are manifestations. So religion ceases to progress when unity is reached, which is the case with Hinduism. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
576:There's something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There's definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you're afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible. ~ Amanda Palmer, #NFDB
577:I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
578:Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother's hand was gone and she'd fallen, clattering to the floor. ~ Brit Bennett, #NFDB
579:It's a mystery that thing about chemistry because often people who hate each other in real life and hate each other on the set have great chemistry on the screen. And people who love each other in real life and love each other on the set have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. ~ Helen Mirren, #NFDB
580:The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
581:Before Max Black, the future seemed boring and there wasn't much to think about. After Max Black, it was like I was looking at a negative, a stack of photographic paper, a jar full of emulsion, a paintbrush, and trays full of chemistry. There was now so much to do.
So much to do. ~ A S King,#NFDB
582:But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached. ~ Jerry Pinto, #NFDB
583:Priestley, who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic for his researches into electricity and chemistry, called for the total abolition of the aristocracy on the grounds that this would prove a moral blessing not only for society but also for the nobility themselves.42 ~ Jonathan I Israel, #NFDB
584:as their eyes met she got that feeling again, that sensation of there being something huge between them, something she couldn’t quite define, something her twenty-year-old self might have called ‘passion’ and her thirty-year-old self might have more cynically called ‘chemistry’. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
585:I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
586:The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
587:Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
588:What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the 'new system of chemical philosophy'), and this proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
589:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the "Mind of God" is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
590:I think you either have chemistry or you don't. If you could create chemistry in the editing room then there would be no films without chemistry, obviously, because there are a lot of good editors out there who'd be able to take care of that then if that's how it really worked. ~ Robert Schwentke, #NFDB
591:As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important. However, you have to go by the script because it's related to production, otherwise you will not finish your project. ~ Tommy Wiseau, #NFDB
592:I don't do this," he continued. "I don't get involved. But I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you. It started out as chemistry, pure sexual attraction. I don't even know what to call it. But it's different now. It's bigger and I can't control it and I can't not be with you. ~ Susan Mallery, #NFDB
593:In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
594:I was grateful I could attach my feelings for him to something, even a scientific connection. Chemistry. I thought about the amount of energy we produced when we accidentally touched and had a brief vision of what it would be like if our lips met. Would the world explode around us? ~ Myra McEntire, #NFDB
595:Berzelius' symbols are horrifying. A young student in chemistry might as soon learn Hebrew as make himself acquainted with them... They appear to me equally to perplex the adepts in science, to discourage the learner, as well as to cloud the beauty and simplicity of the atomic theory. ~ John Dalton, #NFDB
596:I can go back to my very first movie, Thirteen, and think about that exact moment when I saw Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood do their chemistry read audition together. It just came alive. I was filming it with a video camera and I was like, "I know I can make a good movie now." ~ Catherine Hardwicke, #NFDB
597:The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
598:Exercise helps me with stress. It changes your brain chemistry. I turn to Ashtanga yoga when I feel the need to relax. I love it, but it's not right for everybody. It's taught to you a little bit at a time, according to your body type and your strength. That keeps things challenging. ~ Lisa Edelstein, #NFDB
599:her breed of crazy was an inability to reconcile her internal chemistry with the facts of the cosmos, the cycles of Earth and Sun. His, on the other hand, was a kind of stark-raving sanity, an acute awareness of deeper, more profound cosmic truths that few could bear to even consider. ~ Douglas Wynne, #NFDB
600:One in a hundred people today suffer from schizophrenia: Nearly all of them, if treated with compassion and good chemistry, can have some kind of dignified life, of a kind that was denied, for much of his time, to Doctor Minor. Except, of course, that Minor had hid dictionary work. ~ Simon Winchester, #NFDB
601:Chemistry is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory; their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
602:I meet with ambassadors from all countries in my role as a member of Congress, and you always have better relationships with those you actually personally get along with. That matters. So if there is chemistry between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, maybe that can bode for something. ~ Adam Kinzinger, #NFDB
603:Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
604:There are basically four kinds of chemistry between dating partners; physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Physical chemistry generates desire. Emotional chemistry generates affection. Mental chemistry creates interest. Spiritual chemistry creates love. A soul mate includes all four. ~ John Gray, #NFDB
605:I have always had the feeling that organic chemistry is a very peculiar science, that organic chemists are unlike other men, and there are few occupations that give more satisfactions [sic] than masterly experimentation along the old lines of this highly specialised science. ~ Lawrence Joseph Henderson, #NFDB
606:One of the things we’ve got figured out is chemistry, gorgeous. We have that in the bag. I can’t be in the same room with you without getting hard … I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you, and I know by the way that your body reacts to me and my touch that you feel the same. ~ Aurora Rose Reynolds, #NFDB
607:People who did not speak the language of organic chemistry, and even many who did, began to worry about unanticipated biocomplex effects—those arising from the complex biological, chemical, physical, and behavioral interrelationships between living organisms and their environment. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
608:Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara, #NFDB
609:Sometimes, you can be more than enough for someone, but they choose not to be in your life. Always remember that Satan works hard to keep people miserable by feeding their fears, so they stay in their comfort zone. The truth is some people value what is predictable, more than chemistry. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
610:I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness. ~ Lois Lowry, #NFDB
611:With any good projects, I feel like the off-screen chemistry factors on-screen. It's great when you don't have to force it, but when it's not there you better focus on getting there, because as we live with these characters we spend more time with one another than we do our families at home. ~ Aldis Hodge, #NFDB
612:People who are role models for the principles and values of the organization, who buy in and understand the vision of what the organization is trying to accomplish, and have the personality to inspire other people to the vision. You know, that’s what team chemistry and leadership is all about. ~ Nick Saban, #NFDB
613:What people don't understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that's what everyone gets wrong. You can't consciously create something that's important, it's a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything. ~ Siouxsie Sioux, #NFDB
614:Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order. ~ Riley Sager, #NFDB
615:Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. ~ Robert Farrar Capon, #NFDB
616:Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry. ~ Peter Agre, #NFDB
617:Four out of the five Nobel Prize laureates in Physics and Chemistry that year were from countries other than the United States. Americans were terrified that the country was falling behind in math and science, so nationwide there was a renewed commitment to education, especially in those fields. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
618:Fulfilling the four needs in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion - an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
619:I'm all about real drama, real performance, and real people, so my twist on this is: I'm creating a family, a brotherhood here. I'm creating a very real chemistry and I have this incredible ensemble of actors led by Will Smith, who are basically playing dimensional characters with lives and souls. ~ David Ayer, #NFDB
620:Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
621:Here's what women want. Most of us, anyway. They want a guy with a bit of an edge who has confidence in himself and who knows what he's looking for in life. Combine that with someone who treats them well, makes them laugh and that they have chemistry with, and ta-da, magic. It's not rocket science. ~ Kara Isaac, #NFDB
622:In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
623:It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
624:I'm very aware of the chemistry. It's something you can't take for granted. I'm very thankful for it and I recognise the power of its reality in all of our lives. Some people don't and it's a mistake not to because people throw away god-given special chemistry that's very rare, very hard to find. ~ Anthony Kiedis, #NFDB
625:I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.) ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
626:I wasn't really driven to be an actor or anything, but in college I decided to study acting, much to my parents' disappointment. I attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers where Bill Esper was, and that is where I really got hooked on the art of acting, and, almost, the chemistry of acting. ~ Roger Bart, #NFDB
627:I've turned down a lot of trades where I might have gotten a better player, but I wasn't totally sure of the chemistry of that new player coming in. Even though he might possess golden ability, his personality and the way he gets along with teammates might be things you just don't want to cope with. ~ Red Auerbach, #NFDB
628:See, when I met Cooper, something in me shifted on an elemental level, as if he changed my chemistry, rearranged me. I needed him, but not in the desperate way. Being with him was a universal truth. It was a quiet fact. Once I found him, the world made sense simply because he was in it and he loved me. ~ Staci Hart, #NFDB
629:Why don't you want a boyfriend?"
"I don't know. Maybe I do. I'd just have to meet the right guy. Someone who isn't ordinary. Someone who get someone I fit perfectly with. I want heat, chemistry, an undeniable connection. You know what I mean? I want it all. I'm done with ordinary and mediocre. ~ Jessica Park,#NFDB
630:Everyone has to do the same work as actors - I teach acting. But there are those people who come on, and there's just something about them in and above themselves that has to do with chemistry and electricity - this aura about them. And that's unmistakable. Do I have that? Yeah, I think I have that. ~ Jeffrey Tambor, #NFDB
631:It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic . ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
632:Psychology, unlike chemistry, unlike algebra, unlike literature, is an owner's manual for your own mind. It's a guide to life. What could be more important than grounding young people in the scientific information that they need to live happy, healthy, productive lives? To have good relationships? ~ Daniel Goldstein, #NFDB
633:Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available to us through the era in which we live, through our own character, through our circumstances and age. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
634:America has had the best university system in the world for a long time. And so we have been innovators, not only in the discoveries as proven by Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics and that sort of thing, but we've been able to put that into practical application with new gadgets that people admire. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
635:For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden. ~ C P Snow, #NFDB
636:Restraining a smile, Owen came around her and laid his hand on the snow's surface. With a silent command, he reworked the internal chemistry of the layers.
Megan nearly fell on her face when the saw sliced right through to the ground. She whooped out a cheer. "Woot! I did it! I did it! Take that, snow ~ Laura Kaye,#NFDB
637:The interrelationship of the self-organization dynamics of material and energetic processes from chemistry through biology to sociobiology and beyond seems to point to the existence of a general dynamic system theory which is valid in a very wide domain of natural systems. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, #NFDB
638:I’ve singled out the humanities and the sciences because they are regarded as natural opposites, even natural enemies. But this is oversimplifying to make a point. Between English at one end of the spectrum and chemistry at the other are many subjects, like economics, that are a mystery to both camps. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
639:Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane. ~ John B Watson, #NFDB
640:To be a great director, what does it mean exactly? It's not only about a great director, but also about being able to rely on the very special chemistry that goes between them. It not only has to be a great director, but the great director has to make his relationship to you, the actor, very special. ~ Isabelle Huppert, #NFDB
641:As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine, is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel. ~ Mehmet Oz, #NFDB
642:Only about seventy years ago was chemistry, like a grain of seed from a ripe fruit, separated from the other physical sciences. With Black, Cavendish and Priestley, its new era began. Medicine, pharmacy, and the useful arts, had prepared the soil upon which this seed was to germinate and to flourish. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
643:I think it's a dance that people want to see. It's a chemistry that people want to see. In the same way that people don't want to see a perfect hero with no flaws who can handle anything, people don't want to see a perfect relationship. There's nothing interesting about that. People want to see you fail. ~ Nathan Fillion, #NFDB
644:You do see a few people and you are thinking of how that chemistry is going to work, but it's not really fair to put people who are auditioning together in a room. You have to make that judgement yourself, and that's partly where the casting director is so good. It was that blend that we were looking for. ~ Adrian Hodges, #NFDB
645:There's this thing that's come about that wasn't there when I started acting which is they do this thing called a chemistry test. They put a camera in front of two people, it's usually a boy and a girl, and they go, [whispering]. It's impossible. You can't manufacture it or film it, it just has to happen. ~ Cillian Murphy, #NFDB
646:I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'. ~ Antal Szerb, #NFDB
647:We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
648:How do you define a boyfriend? If a boyfriend is the first person you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last face you see before you fall asleep, then I was in love with Jonah. But if a boyfriend had to involve physical chemistry and kissing and sex and stuff, then, no, he wasn’t that. ~ Natalie Standiford, #NFDB
649:Mr. Dalton's permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple principle, universally applicable to the facts of chemistry - in fixing the proportions in which bodies combine, and thus laying the foundation for future labors... his merits in this respect resemble those of Kepler in astronomy. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
650:I love working with people I've worked with before and that can be true of when people have worked together. But if two people have a natural chemistry and it just works, to be there for the first time, particularly on a story where it's about these two people meeting for the first time, that goes a long way. ~ Thea Sharrock, #NFDB
651:My grandmother was energetic and fearless - a talented poet and songwriter. She was also interested in chemistry and history and medicine, taking care of the people in her hacienda in Mexico, delivering babies. She could have become anything, but this was the 1930s, and she was forced into an arranged marriage. ~ Salma Hayek, #NFDB
652:Is it really that easy? Can I really save the world? Sure. I just called a friend of mine who is a chemist. He has a technology that might improve the way we get energy. Make it cheaper. Less pollution. I have no idea about chemistry. But just talking to him and encouraging him I felt like I was helping the world. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
653:True love is so much more than sexual chemistry or attraction. True love is finding a mate who is as devoted to you as you are to them. Who will hold your hand through the good and the bad. Who will love you even though you’ve begun to age, started to wrinkle, when your looks are no longer what they once were. ~ Brenna Aubrey, #NFDB
654:I think chemistry is being frittered away by the hairsplitting of the organic chemists; we have new compounds discovered, which scarcely differ from the known ones and when discovered are valueless-very illustrations perhaps of their refinements in analysis, but very little aiding the progress of true science. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
655:The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
656:The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate. But ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
657:In those days there was really neat stuff in chemistry sets,” Moore recalled, lamenting that government regulations and parental fears have since neutered such kits and probably deprived the nation of some needed scientists. He was able to turn out a small quantity of nitroglycerin, which he made into dynamite. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
658:Look, no gay man is oblivious to a beautiful woman. I’m gay, I’ve partnered women and believe me, you feel it going on. Beauty is beauty. And straight or gay, you are immersed in this intense, artistic chemistry which is both sensual and sensory. Chemistry is chemistry. It just isn’t rooted in sexual attraction. ~ Suanne Laqueur, #NFDB
659:Chemistry is really about two people who like to act together, I think. It's like tennis in the most cliched way. It's like if you hit the ball, they hit the ball back, and they don't hit it into the stands, and they don't put the ball in their pocket and walk off - and they don't argue with the umpire, you know? ~ David Duchovny, #NFDB
660:Though in fairness, before tonight she wouldn't have known exactly how to classify them. Sorta childhood friends through her brother, turned business rivals who had absolutely incendiary chemistry when they let it loose, which was almost never. Yeah, that wasn't unclear at all... Sarcasm. Kady's second-favorite —asm. ~ Laura Kaye, #NFDB
661:I think there is an element of magic in photography - light, chemistry, precious metals - a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things. ~ Keith Carter, #NFDB
662:it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
663:There are these fantasies among people who watch movies where they're like, "Oh, there's a chemistry between them - something going on." And sometimes there is. But for me, it's more like, I go to work, I do a job, I play a role, and then I go home. I don't wear a cape at home. I'm not an invulnerable alien at home. ~ Henry Cavill, #NFDB
664:There was in Madison’s critical assessment of the state governments a discernible antidemocratic ethos rooted in the conviction that political popularity generated a toxic chemistry of appeasement and demagoguery that privileged popular whim and short-term interests at the expense of the long-term public interest. ~ Joseph J Ellis, #NFDB
665:Tonight had given her hope. Maybe he had grown up, learned a thing or two over the years. Maybe it was time to put the past behind her. Maybe they could live in harmony for the next several months. If she could just ignore the chemistry and block out his handsome face, maybe they could manage a cautious friendship. ~ Denise Hunter, #NFDB
666:t is for me because I needed to do this. I really think actors shouldn't act unless they really need it in their lives. I think it has to be something that is so much a part of your chemistry, such a passion, that you can't live without it. You should not do it just because you are seeking fame or want to get rich. ~ John Leguizamo, #NFDB
667:Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. ~ Nathan Myhrvold, #NFDB
668:I feel like I can always do better with action and I always want to push the envelope there as long as I can because I'm a physical person and I love expressing myself physically, but I'm also, on the very flipside, an extremely emotional person. I like watching the relationships and the chemistry and the relatability. ~ Gina Carano, #NFDB
669:It would take a big change in Earth’s geology and chemistry for it to become exactly like Venus. But humans are pouring carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere right now at an alarming rate, shoving our climate in that high-carbon direction, which is a terrifying prospect. We do not want to become even a little like Venus. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
670:And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry.
And ~ Charles Taylor,#NFDB
671:WHY is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
672:A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. ~ Fred Hoyle, #NFDB
673:Oh, Dak. You don't actually know the answer, do you? Poor thing. That's okay. It happens. Remember when I got a ninety-nine point seven five percent on my college prep Chemistry exam last year? That was..." Sera's eyes clouded over and she shook her head. "That was... heartbreaking. I understand what you're going through. ~ Lisa McMann, #NFDB
674:Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. ~ Allen W Wood, #NFDB
675:character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which children grow ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
676:Maybe I wanted you to be at the wedding. Maybe I didn’t want to be the only guy present without a date. Maybe I never forgot how it felt to kiss those adorable, pouty lips of yours, or the chemistry between us.” He hesitated for a few seconds before adding, “After I had a taste, you had to know I’d be back for more.” Kristin ~ J S Scott, #NFDB
677:These early Hindu physicians, after all, were linking diabetes to carbohydrate consumption and sugar more than a millennium before the invention of organic chemistry and its revelations that sugar, rice, and flour were carbohydrates and that carbohydrate “in digestion is converted into the sugar which appears in the urine. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
678:Eight men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert Einstein. ~ Manjit Kumar, #NFDB
679:A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
680:Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
681:The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
682:Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett's marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Day followed day. A year went by. ~ Helen DeWitt,#NFDB
683:The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
684:If everything in chemistry is explained in a satisfactory manner without the help of phlogiston, it is by that reason alone infinitely probable that the principle does not exist; that it is a hypothetical body, a gratuitous supposition; indeed, it is in the principles of good logic, not to multiply bodies without necessity. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
685:People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They’re wrong. That’s like saying you have to know how to knit to be a housewife, or that you have to know Latin to study the Bible. Sure, it helps, but there will be time for that. What comes first is a question, and you’re already there. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
686:Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
687:Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore he is the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
688:But in the end, when you stop to think about it, we are, after all, no more than mere particles of dust, drifting along together through eternity, and so it is pleasant to think that we have—in this way or that, for better or for worse—reached out and touched one another. That, in the end, is what chemistry is all about, isn’t it? ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
689:In the room beside, a chemistry table crowded with beakers and burners. Succulent plants, twisted and knobbled in their little pots, that she fed a mixture of vinegar and almond milk each morning from an eyedropper. ("It's an experiment," Holmes told me when I protested. "I'm trying to kill them. Nothing kills them.") ~ Brittany Cavallaro, #NFDB
690:It's a familiar story now: a meek and depressed high school chemistry teacher with terminal cancer cooks up a scheme to make and market a superior grade of methamphetamine to provide a nest egg for his family after he's gone. But over the course of five seasons Walter White goes from milquetoast to murderous in order to survive. ~ Bryan Cranston, #NFDB
691:We didn't have a lot of time to really prepare for a great chemistry. It was more instantaneous and instinctive. In the morning I went to Daniel Craig trailer and if I wanted to make some changes there was sort of a go between me and the director. It was good because Daniel is always like, "C'mon let's go for it. Let's fight for it!" ~ Eva Green, #NFDB
692:I could’ve let down my guard a bit and not been quite so confrontational, but it had felt good sparring with him like that. It had made me feel alive. There had been a kind of exciting chemistry building between us, and I realized that pushing his buttons had not only been thoroughly enjoyable, but comfortably familiar. I was a freak! ~ C J Anaya, #NFDB
693:I couldn't have asked for a better acting partner and a better human being to work with. We have to work very closely together, and I felt, in our screen test, that we had really good chemistry, but I wasn't sure if I was just making that up. Max has written a really finely wrought bromance. I have complete trust in Elijah [Wood]. ~ Samuel Barnett, #NFDB
694:I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology. ~ David Papineau, #NFDB
695:What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
696:When you are the Guardian of the Truth, you’ve got nothing useful to contribute to the Truth but your guardianship of it. When you’re trying to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry by discovering the next benzene or buckyball, someone who challenges the atomic theory isn’t so much a threat to your worldview as a waste of your time. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
697:Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
698:Carbon dioxide pollution is transforming the chemistry of the ocean, rapidly making the water more acidic. In decades, rising ocean acidity may challenge life on a scale that has not occurred for tens of millions of years. So we confront an urgent choice: to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds. ~ Sigourney Weaver, #NFDB
699:Till now, my conception of love has been based entirely on what I have seen in Hindi films, where the hero and the heroine make eye contact, and whoosh, some strange chemistry sets their hearts beating and their vocal chords tingling, and the next you see of them they are off singing songs in Swiss Villages and American shopping malls. ~ Vikas Swarup, #NFDB
700:You can’t hurry love, and you can’t rush puff pastry, either. You can knead too much, and you can be too needy. Always, warmth is what brings pastry to rise. Chemistry creates something amazing; coupled with care and heat, it works some kind of magic to create this satisfying, welcoming, and nourishing thing that is the base of life. ~ Kathleen Flinn, #NFDB
701:Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously : it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are that catalyst. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
702:Bring your lips closer until they’re touching mine.” When I did, the heat was electric. “Can you feel that?” he asked, moving his lips from one corner of my mouth to the other. “That’s the chemistry between man and woman. It doesn’t need to be forced. You shouldn’t overthink what to do with your mouth or tongue—give in to your instincts. ~ Dannika Dark, #NFDB
703:I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience. ~ Shane Black, #NFDB
704:QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
705:In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. You must care. You don't have to know how many square miles are in Idaho, you don't need to know what is the chemical makeup of chemistry, or of blood or water. Know what you know and care about the person, care about what you know and care about the person you're sharing with. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
706:Everybody is great and the chemistry is different with everyone. That is the joy of acting - you really don't know how it is going to go until you turn up. It's like playing tennis, you can't plan for the match you are going to play until you are actually up against your opponent and what happens, happens. That is the joy of being on set. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB
707:It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
708:Learning organic chemistry is not any more challenging than getting to know some new characters. The elements each have their own unique personalities. The more you understand those personalities, the more you will be able to read their situations and predict the outcomes of reactions.” —Kathleen Nolta, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Chemistry ~ Barbara Oakley, #NFDB
709:She was startled by how rarely she had been alone back then. Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor. She ~ Brit Bennett, #NFDB
710:I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos...create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction, ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
711:Life may be chemistry, but it’s a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
712:Why are precisely these elements listed there, and why does the periodic table have this particular structure, with these periods, and with the elements having these specific properties? The answer is that each element corresponds to one solution of the main equation of quantum mechanics. The whole of chemistry emerges from a single equation. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
713:I didn’t marry you just for the good years. I didn’t marry you just for the amazing chemistry we have. And I’d be foolish to think our marriage could last an eternity without a few tough moments. So, while this year has been our toughest yet, I know one thing with complete certainty. I love you more this year than any year that came before it. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
714:The Arab peoples possess an ancient and highly developed civilization that is in many ways more sophisticated than our own. For instance, they invented algebra. And this is why we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein this minute and bomb the shish kebab out of him before he invents trig and chemistry and the whole of America flunks high school. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
715:The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
716:The theoretical side of physical chemistry is and will probably remain the dominant one; it is by this peculiarity that it has exerted such a great influence upon the neighboring sciences, pure and applied, and on this ground physical chemistry may be regarded as an excellent school of exact reasoning for all students of the natural sciences. ~ Svante Arrhenius, #NFDB
717:A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
718:If you took organic chemistry in college, you’ve experienced the Dip. Academia doesn’t want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen. Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can’t handle organic chemistry, well, then, you can’t go to med school. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
719:The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That's why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
720:What happened felt more like chemistry than a kiss. Pure liquid heat on my lips, dissolving into me, trailing a hot line down my chest and pooling in my stomach. My heels rose off the floor. All of me rose, unanchored, held down only by his weight pressing me to the chilly slab of the door. We kissed as we could not have done until now—like lovers. ~ Leah Raeder, #NFDB
721:If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
722:One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry... ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
723:I'm funding a new business with money I would have given away in the first place. And I'm starting a responsible business and I'm educating the consumer about chemistry that is totally sustainable - not just from a production point of view, but it also helps sustain the human psyche and physical body - based on informational, energetic matter. ~ Horst Rechelbacher, #NFDB
724:Cooking isn’t taught,” Patch said. “It’s inherent. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. Like chemistry. You think you’re ready for chemistry?” I pressed the knife down through the tomato; it split in two, each half rocking gently on the cutting board. “You tell me. Am I ready for chemistry?” Patch made a deep sound I couldn’t decipher and grinned. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick, #NFDB
725:I hurried forward and looked into the room to my left. It was a chemistry lab with a sweeping view of the snowy terrain outside, complete with large black islands in the middle of the room, independent sinks with an eyewash and a shower in the corner, silver fixtures with gas taps to run experiments with fire—
Hrmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hehehehehe. ~ Robert J Crane,#NFDB
726:I think it gets really dangerous, though, to do it on the show. I think that the writers and producers are very much aware of that and the dangers of putting characters together and what that can mean for the show. You know, it's possible it could kill the thing that holds the show together, the chemistry, sexual tension between the two characters. ~ Emily Deschanel, #NFDB
727:Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
728:While I worked as a surgery nurse at St. Thomas's, I undertook private tuition to obtain certificates in anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. At the Sorbonne, I took honors in anatomy for two years, and the top prize in midwifery for three. I also studied for a brief time with Sir Joseph Lister, who instructed me in his techniques of antiseptic surgery. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
729:Religion and science, for example, are often though to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, physics, but many were good psychologists. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
730:The drive was difficult, because at this point it seemed that everyone in town but the two of us had hopped onto the buzzing shadow entity train, and were loping around town as malevolent holes in our reality, emanating an energy that made the hairs on your arm stand and your bowels vibrate. Or maybe that was just the chemistry with Carlos I was feeling. ~ Joseph Fink, #NFDB
731:How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, "creating" a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
732:We would talk about chemistry for hours at end, for I liked complex benzene rings with methyl groups hanging here and there, and she liked the thirty-something teacher who taught us the subject. Little did I know that we wouldn’t last long. For, I was like an inert gas, unlikeable and uninteractive, while she was like an alkali, combustible and excitable. ~ Durjoy Datta, #NFDB
733:When you're working opposite Halle Berry, you're going to get a lot. So you have to give a lot. That said, what I've found striking in the past few days is that people are aware of a good chemistry that exists between us on screen. If that's so, it's due to the fact that she and I have a real liking for each other in real life and a real mutual respect. ~ Benjamin Bratt, #NFDB
734:Because when you work with a different team, the expectations are different and then you deliver in a very different way. You look back at it and you're proud of yourself. And when the same people come in and you do the same thing, it's boring. You could re-envision it again and again but when the new chemistry of ideas comes in, something happens as a team. ~ A R Rahman, #NFDB
735:Cooking isn’t taught,” Patch said. “It’s inherent. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. Like chemistry. You think you’re ready for chemistry?” I pressed the knife down through the tomato; it split in two, each half rocking gently on the cutting board.
“You tell me. Am I ready for chemistry?” Patch made a deep sound I couldn’t decipher and grinned. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
736:Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
737:Pastry is like people . . . You can't hurry love, and you can't rush puff pastry either. You can knead too much, and you can be too needy. Always, warmth is what brings pastry to rise. Chemistry creates something amazing; coupled with care and heat, it works some kind of magic to create a satisfying, welcoming, and nourishing thing that is the base of life. ~ Kathleen Flinn, #NFDB
738:The most important steps that I followed were studying math and science in school. I was always interested in physics and astronomy and chemistry and I continued to study those subjects through high school and college on into graduate school. That's what prepared me for being an astronaut; it actually gave me the qualifications to be selected to be an astronaut. ~ Sally Ride, #NFDB
739:whether sex is being discussed or ignored, repressed or expressed, enjoyed or endured, it is the single most significant aspect of our lives. Sex is always in the mind. It forms a central theme in our thoughts and daydreams. It is part of our chemistry, as each sentient creature on this planet was created in sex from the union of male and female cells. Our ~ Diana Richardson, #NFDB
740:You humans are so good at ignoring things. You are almost blind and almost deaf. You look at a tree and see…just a tree, a stiff weed. You don’t see its history, feel the pumping of the sap, hear every insect in the bark, sense the chemistry of the leaves, notice the hundred shades of green, the tiny movements to follow the sun, the subtle growth of wood... ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
741:Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The alchemists founded chemistry by pursuing chimerical problems and theories which are false. In physical science, which is more advanced than biology, we might still cite men of science who make great discoveries by relying on false theories. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
742:Synthesis..., perhaps in greater measure than activities in any other area of organic chemistry, provides a measure of the condition and power of science. For synthetic undertakings are seldom if ever undertaken by chance, nor will the most painstaking, or inspired, purely observational activities suffice. Synthesis must always be carried out by plan. ~ Robert Burns Woodward, #NFDB
743:Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry.... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry -- an aberration which is happily almost impossible -- it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
744:It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences. ~ Peter Medawar, #NFDB
745:So now do you see why books are hated and feared? The show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, pore less, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
746:In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn't. I felt only anger. WE were the ones who paid for it, I thought. We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
747:See you later, Ice.” Alice’s face fell a little. “It’s Alice.” “Mind if I go with Ice?” Usually, her name got shortened to Ali or Ally. Lice once, thanks to a mean girl in fourth grade. But never Ice. “Why Ice?” she asked. “It has the most beautiful crystalline structure.” Oh! He was flirting with her using molecular structures. If this wasn’t perfect chemistry… ~ Camilla Isley, #NFDB
748:The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium. ~ Stephen C Meyer, #NFDB
749:There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That’s what stevia tastes like to me.” “I’m not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that’s what you’re trying to say. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
750:Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
751:Ninety percent of my roles, I've had to fight for. It's only a really small percentage of people who get handed roles. But that can be quite scary. The good thing about auditioning is that you get to test yourself and see if you can play this character - you're also auditioning yourself. I enjoy seeing what the chemistry is between the people you might be working with. ~ Ruth Negga, #NFDB
752:To a guy, quality time consists of sitting in the same room and relaxing with a woman he’s in love with, even if they are both doing a separate activity. When a guy is madly in love, being together is exciting. If the chemistry is right, the girl would not need continual conversation. Without comfortable silence, he will never feel like he can recharge his batteries. ~ Sherry Argov, #NFDB
753:If an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy, chemistry, or geology, our religion embraces it all. It matters not what the subject be, if it tends to improve the mind, exalt the feelings, and enlarge the capacity. The truth that is in all the arts and sciences forms part of our religion. Faith is no more a part of it than any other true principle of philosophy. ~ Brigham Young, #NFDB
754:It was a singular document. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
755:Although I was four years at the University [of Wisconsin], I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer. ~ John Muir, #NFDB
756:I can control what happens in the chemistry lab. There's a formula and an equation, and I know exactly what the reaction will be when I mix one thing with another. Life, not so much. Love, not at all. No matter what elements you combine, you really have no idea what happens next. It's scary not knowing what comes next. But not knowing might also be the best part. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, #NFDB
757:It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
758:Liebig taught the world two great lessons. The first was that in order to teach chemistry it was necessary that students should be taken into a laboratory. The second lesson was that he who is to apply scientific thought and method to industrial problems must have a thorough knowledge of the sciences. The world learned the first lesson more readily than it learned the second. ~ Ira Remsen, #NFDB
759:Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
760:To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise... Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
761:For me, chemistry is trust. If you have trust you can risk together. It's like a partnership and it means you can have fun together while jumping off a mountain. I have not always been able to get good trust with an acting partner. One of the best was Juliet Landau; I always felt safe with her. Chemistry has nothing to do with physical attraction - that often gets in the way. ~ James Marsters, #NFDB
762:The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
763:This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
764:Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.
{Commenting on Henri Becquerel's process for extracting metals by voltaic means.} ~ Michael Faraday,#NFDB
765:The spirit of man is regarded as a luminous principle perfect in wisdom, the origin of the life in man. This spirit, descending into dark bodies, achieves through the chemistry of experience the mysterious power that is called Soul. The Virgin of the world is Soul; in the Universe the World Soul; in man the human soul. The soul is the dark Princess. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
766:You know, what is team chemistry? My opinion is when you have enough people who care about winning and enough people who losing affects. That's what chemistry means to me. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to win, but you're going to have enough people on the same page. It's almost impossible, I think, to get everyone on the same page, but it's gotta mean something to you. ~ Derek Jeter, #NFDB
767:She closed her eyes. “Okay, here’s the thing. We have some chemistry,” she allowed.
“Some? Or supernova?”
“Supernova. But,” she said to his knowing grin. Good Lord, he needed to stop doing that. “I really did give up men.”
“Forever?”
“My gut says yes, but that might be PMS talking. Let’s just say I’m giving up men for a very long time.”
“You going to try out women? ~ Jill Shalvis,#NFDB
768:Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body...are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
769:The chemistry of mind is different from the chemistry of love. The mind is careful, suspicious, he advances little by little. He advises “Be careful, protect yourself” Whereas love says “Let yourself, go!” The mind is strong, never falls down, while love hurts itself, falls into ruins. But isn’t it in ruins that we mostly find the treasures? A broken heart hides so many treasures. ~ Shams Tabrizi, #NFDB
770:The most frequent reasons we get turned down as romantic prospects (or as job applicants) are because of a lack of general chemistry, because we don’t match the person’s or company’s specific needs at that time, or because we don’t fit the narrow definition of who they’re looking for—not because of any critical missteps we might have made nor because we have any fatal character flaws. ~ Guy Winch, #NFDB
771:There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
772:It is attention, more than any difference between minds and men.-In this is the source of poetic genius, and of the genius of discovery in science.-It was that led Newton to the invention of fluxions, and the discovery of gravitation, and Harvey to find out the circulation of the blood, and Davy to those views which laid the foundation of modern chemistry. ~ Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie 1st Baronet, #NFDB
773:But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
774:People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They’re wrong. That’s like saying you have to know how to knit to be a housewife, or that you have to know Latin to study the Bible. Sure, it helps, but there will be time for that. What comes first is a question, and you’re already there. It’s not nearly as involved as people make it out to be. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
775:Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much. ~ Lorrie Moore, #NFDB
776:For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes—as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.] ~ C P Snow,#NFDB
777:We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets. ~ Jill Tarter, #NFDB
778:Because just being
around you makes me so fucking happy, you airhead. I
like you. I want you. I see my unborn children in your
eyes—okay scratch that one. I swear to fuck I’m not
being flip here.” I sighed. “What my heart does
whenever you’re near isn’t just about chemistry Cam.
It’s like…stargazing. I feel insignificant and dazzled.
Hopeful yet completely unprepared. ~ Z A Maxfield,#NFDB
779:What was the point of being a mind anchored to this read weight-or dying weight, that was it, a blooby mass already becoming old, bubbling with latent cancers, each cell wall ready too rupture like a cheap sandwich bag and spill its chemistry back into the soil. If people had to be trapped inside something, why not a robot made of something dependable, something solid, like a brick wall? ~ Daryl Gregory, #NFDB
780:Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
781:It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[ ~ H W Brands, #NFDB
782:The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
783:I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell people we’re an item. It was nice of you to take me to dinner and I had a good time, but I don’t think we’ll be dating.”
“Do you find me attractive?”
“Uh…”
“I thought so,” he said. “Already told you tonight you were beautiful. So since we’ve got some major fucking chemistry and we get along, how about we cut the bullshit and see where this goes? ~ Devney Perry,#NFDB
784:it's the overconsumption of carbohydrates, sugar and sweeteners that is chiefly responsible for the epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Refined carbohydrates--like those in "wheat" bread, hidden sugar, low-fat crackers and pasta--cause changes in our blood chemistry that encourage the body to store the calories as fat and intensify hunger, making it that much more difficult to lose weight. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
785:If we do not take this road of dialogue and understanding then I fear for the next generation. There are enough people preaching hatred, which encourages violence. We are living in times when technology, biology and chemistry have created the possibility of killing in large numbers. And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion. ~ Akbar S Ahmed, #NFDB
786:'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
787:...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
788:Come on, don't pretend like you don't want Aiden to do that to you. You two have so much chemistry if you don't do it pretty soon you may combust and kill us all.” That makes me laugh. “Maybe, but if she's really your future wife, you should wait a little. I mean, what would you tell your kids?” “I’d tell them Mom’s ass looked so good in her bikini I couldn't help myself. My sons will understand. ~ Jillian Dodd, #NFDB
789:I have been so electrically occupied of late that I feel as if hungry for a little chemistry: but then the conviction crosses my mind that these things hang together under one law & that the more haste we make onwards each in his own path the sooner we shall arrive, and meet each other, at that state of knowledge of natural causes from which all varieties of effects may be understood & enjoyed. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
790:When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
791:You cry, "give us war!" You are visionaries. When will you become thinkers? The thinkers do not look for power and strength from any of the dreams that constitute military art: tactics, strategies, fortifications, artillery and all that rubbish. They do no believe in war, which is a fantasy; they believe in chemistry, which is a science. They know the way to put victory into an algebraic formula. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
792:By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people’s savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
793:Putting aside the fact that graveyards also contain large numbers of wives and mothers, Mills was wrong on another front: A job may very well love you back. It may sustain and support you, buoy your spirits and engage your mind, as the best romantic partner would, and far more effectively than a subpar spouse might. In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
794:If the chemistry was too simple and the complexity of the interactions was too low, then nothing would happen; the system would be "subcritical." But if the complexity of the interactions was rich enough-and Kauffman's mathematics now allowed him to define precisely what that meant-then the system would be "supercritical." Autocatalysis would be inevitable. And the order really would be for free. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop, #NFDB
795:There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations. ~ Frank McCourt, #NFDB
796:The finest imagination in the world could not have conceived of a better idea than the philosophers' stone to inspire the minds and faculties of men. Without it, chemistry would not be what it is today. In order to discover that no such thing as the philosopher's stone existed, it was necessary to ransack and analyze every substance known on earth. And in precisely this lay its miraculous influence. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
797:Timing is everything. Chemistry is something that you don't just throw in the frying pan and mix it up with another something, then throw it on top of something, then fry it up and put it in a tortilla and put in a microwave, heat it up and give it to you and expect it to taste good. You know? For those of you who can cook, y'all know what I'm talking about. If y'all can't cook, this doesn't concern you. ~ Kevin Garnett, #NFDB
798:Chemistry comes about through the transformation of earth, air, fire and water. All chemistry is just movement within those things, and so we experience the joys and the sorrows of hot and cold, and dry and moist, because of these chemical transformations. In a similar way, we create and experience a world of time, space, motion and energy, through our intuitions, our thoughts, our sensing and our feeling. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
799:Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings. ~ Nick Harkaway, #NFDB
800:I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
801:We live in a society where we're not taught how to deal with our weaknesses and frailties as human beings. We're not taught how to speak to our difficulties and challenges. We're taught the Pythagorean theorem and chemistry and biology and history. We're not taught anger management. We're not taught dissolution of fear and how to process shame and guilt. I've never in my life ever used the Pythagorean theorem! ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
802:There are 3 levels of compatibility in intimate relationships that connect the most subtle realm of spirit to the most outer, dense form of body. There must be alignment in heart, through life view and spiritual intention; mind, through clear, open communication; and body, through physical chemistry. Compatibility on all 3 levels of heart, mind, and body is the ultimate love relationship, which everyone is seeking! ~ John Friend, #NFDB
803:Doing a film with your friend is probably the best way to end that friendship but we worked together really well. We just have that thing. Chemistry is something that... I just think it is the last thing in Hollywood, the last magical thing they haven't computerised. There's nothing you can do about it - it's either there or it's not and it doesn't matter if you're friends or not. It was just a bonus that we were. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
804:Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated. ~ Barry Commoner, #NFDB
805:physician and viral researcher Frank Ryan comments . . . Viruses have a kind of sensation that could be classed as intermediate between a rudimentary smell or touch . . . they have a way of detecting the chemical composition of cell surfaces. . . . This gives a virus the most exquisite ability to sense the right cell surfaces. It recognizes them through a perception in three-dimensional surface chemistry.1 ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
806:Every branch of science likes to think it’s important, and of course, they all are. But they’re specializations. Much of biology, for example, is biochemistry, which is a specialization of organic chemistry, which is a specialization of chemistry, which is a specialization of physics, and physics is practical mathematics. No matter which set of matryoshka dolls you open in science, the innermost is always math. ~ Jonathan L Howard, #NFDB
807:Hendricks is mean. My sister’s been skipping school since last week. Now I have to try to convince her she should go to school.”
Luke’s dark brown eyes softened. The blond locks were pulled back with a clip he’d stolen from me. “I know how you feel. I’ve got a chemistry test tomorrow.”
Stone, C. L. (2013-10-27). Forgiveness and Permission: The Ghost Bird Series: #4 (p. 95). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition. ~ C L Stone,#NFDB
808:There are many ways to get to know someone, and my favorite is seeing them naked in Happy Baby pose.
I also feel it is important to have sex soon after meeting someone in order to find out if you have sexual chemistry together. Otherwise, you could wait two to three months after you start dating someone only to discover that your new boyfriend is bad in bed, or even worse, is into anal beads and duct tape. ~ Chelsea Handler,#NFDB
809:Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
810:If I'd loved my chemistry teacher and my maths teacher, goodness knows what direction my life might have gone in. I remember there was a primary school teacher who really woke me up to the joys of school for about one year when I was ten. He made me interested in things I would otherwise not have been interested in - because he was a brilliant teacher. He was instrumental in making me think learning was quite exciting. ~ Colin Firth, #NFDB
811:What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
812:You don't have to be best friends as basketball players but I do believe in chemistry. I think it makes everything different if a team is really together and they're all on that same page. They might not like each other, per se, but if you're on the same page and the chemistry is there, you can play great basketball. You can go back to teams like Detroit, the Bad Boys. Those guys had great chemistry, that's why they won. ~ Dwight Howard, #NFDB
813:(Aristotle, whose name is so much taken in vain by our logicians, would turn in his grave if he knew that so many Logicians know no more about Logic to-day than he did 2,000 years ago.) The author has not taken the slightest notice of the great work of the modern mathematical logicians – work which has brought about an advance in Logic comparable only to that which made Astronomy out of Astrology, and Chemistry out of Alchemy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
814:Brittany flew out of school today, following Burro Face. Before I left I saw them together in an intimate conversation by the back field. She picked him over me, which really shouldn’t surprise me. When she asked me in chemistry what she should do, I should have told her to dump that pendejo. Then I’d be happy instead of pissed off. ¡Es un carbón de mierdaǃ
He doesn’t deserve her. Okay, so I don’t, either. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
815:Without an acquaintance with chemistry, the statesman must remain a stranger to the true vital interests of the state, to the means of its organic development and improvement; ... The highest economic or material interests of a country, the increased and more profitable production of food for man and animals, ... are most closely linked with the advancement and diffusion of the natural sciences, especially of chemistry. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
816:Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down. ~ Marina Chapman, #NFDB
817:Life may be chemistry, but it's a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing us to live on the edges of chemical entropy-skating perilously, but never falling in. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
818:The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution. ~ Mike Jay, #NFDB
819:I think it was good, we wanted to win no matter if it was 1-0 or 8-2, we got to win. The Russians are a great team, but so are we. So we've gotta prepare the way we can and play the way we can tomorrow. I think that every game, every practice together we've continue to get better. It's tough in these short tournaments you gotta bond quickly and you've gotta have good chemistry; so hopefully now we can build on that and keep going. ~ Shea Weber, #NFDB
820:Because I was a chemistry student and was never supposed to be a musician, I always felt like I was an outsider looking at music going "Why is this interesting to me? Why should I be doing this?" and I never felt like I was a natural musician. It came into my life, kind of, as a conceptual problem and I think all my pieces are, in a way, looking at some issue and sometimes veering toward an inside baseball model of classical music. ~ David Lang, #NFDB
821:Most people probably never stop to think about why our burial places are so green. But if they ever did, their faces might turn the very shade of that graveyard grass, for underneath the picturesque moss and lichen, and beneath all those weathered stones, is a slowly simmering chemical stew, bubbling and burbling away in the dark earth as our ancestors and neighbors, with the help of a little chemistry, are returned to their Maker. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
822:That man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
823:The tea is pure chemistry, and so is everything else. But chemistry can be highly active with nutrients, it could be not very active and empty of nutrients or it could be a toxic, polluted substance. That's what interests me as an environmentalist, because I think we should only produce the purest, finest things. Then there would be no toxic side effects. There would be no wastes, because everything would be used responsibly. ~ Horst Rechelbacher, #NFDB
824:No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like “mistake” or “error” or “weakness,” the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
825:To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
826:I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers. ~ Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the U.S. government’s effort to decipher the human genome (DNA). cnn.com., #NFDB
827:Shane and Elsa stuck close as they navigated the food lines, but he kept looking around, probably searching for Adrian. I wasn’t sure what was going on with them, but Adrian was the only wolf who actively sought us out. He had a little bit of brujo blood and said he wanted to learn more about his magic lineage, but the way he and Shane kept exchanging looks… If my gut was right, I was sensing definite chemistry between the two of them. ~ Aileen Erin, #NFDB
828:connection or cooperative link between people or organizations: he developed a close association with the university | the program was promoted in association with the Department of Music. - the action or state of becoming a member of an organization with subordinate status: [as adj.] Slovenia signed association agreements with the European Union. - [CHEMISTRY] the linking of molecules through hydrogen bonding or other interaction short ~ Erin McKean, #NFDB
829:The seemingly insuperable difficulties of deep-space travel suggest an intention to keep us fixed at home in our own solar system, and the physical nature of our part of the Universe, as well as the basic rules of physics and chemistry, have a warning look about them, like barriers designed to isolate intelligent life. This means that for us, unlike the situation for humble microorganisms, deep-space travel is probably a stark impossibility. ~ Fred Hoyle, #NFDB
830:Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. I ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB
831:Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as "Mother of Chemistry", and confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work. ~ Jim Morrison, in The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision, #NFDB
832:For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
833:The blooper’ as Watson described it, 'was too unbelievable to keep secret for more than a few minutes.’ He dashed over to a chemist friend in the neighboring lab to show him Pauling’s structure. The chemist concurred, 'The giant [Pauling] had forgotten elementary college chemistry.’ Watson told Crick, and both took off for the Eagle, their favorite pub, where they celebrated Pauling’s failure with shots of schadenfreude infused whiskey. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
834:And I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all mankind, for they are already the fruit, the real fruit of all mankind, and maybe the highest fruit there ever may be! A form of beauty already achieved, without the achievement of which I might not even consent to live... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
835:We still know so little about how the brain interacts with the body chemistry or, for that matter, whether we should be talking about the brain or the mind, that it would be perilous to hazard any guess about the way Abraham Lincoln's biological health may or may not have affected him. Of course, we don't have Lincoln on hand to ask him directly; but even if we did, we still might not be able to make sense of how all the parts worked together. ~ Allen C Guelzo, #NFDB
836:Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate revolution, when the texture and chemistry of the seafloor (at that time, the entire habitable surface of the planet) was rapidly remade by a spurt of biological innovation that caused both mass death and fantastic new evolutionary opportunity. This ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
837:I'm on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, "Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That's where the writers are most likely to be. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
838:In its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities-and further needs. And we should not forget that needs drive the evolution of technology every bit as much as the possibilities for fresh combination and the unearthing of phenomena. Without the presence of unmet needs, nothing novel would appear in technology. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
839:As I come to the end of my advice and send you off into the world, I have an alternative way for you to stay on the straight and narrow: periodically watch Groundhog Day. It was made long ago, in 1993, but it’s still smart and funny, the chemistry between the stars (Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell) is terrific, and it has a happy ending. Groundhog Day is also a profound moral fable that deals with the most fundamental issues of virtue and happiness. ~ Charles Murray, #NFDB
840:I just feel like it's easier to co-write sometimes, especially if you have chemistry with somebody. It kind of takes all the pressure off of you. But, you know, I started writing songs by myself. I didn't really have a co-writer, besides my dad. When I see a record and it has a song on it that someone wrote [alone], I just really believe in them as a writer. I feel like it's a window into them, more than it is if you write a song with someone else. ~ Miranda Lambert, #NFDB
841:Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads. ~ Thomas Hunt Morgan, #NFDB
842:The human brain is incredible in its capacity to heal and rewire itself. The human brain can be shaped and trained to be more resilient, calm, compassionate and alert—we can condition ourselves to be successful. Through mindfulness meditation, we can literally re-wire our brains through new experiences, which modify our neural network and our neural chemistry. Mindfulness also enhances gamma synchrony and improves the function of the human brain. ~ Christopher Dines, #NFDB
843:I would say if a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. But to speak of the craft itself, I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer. Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
844:It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry. ~ Herman Boerhaave, #NFDB
845:My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
846:He used his intellect as he used his legs: to carry him somewhere else. He studied astrology, astronomy, botany, chemistry, numerology, fortification, divination, organ building, metallurgy, medicine, perspective, the kabbala, toxicology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. He kept his interest in anatomy and did a dissection whenever he could get hold of a body. He learned Arabic, Catalan, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Hungarian, Romany, and demotic Greek. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner, #NFDB
847:As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient. ~ Jons Jacob Berzelius, #NFDB
848:For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything. ~ Primo Levi, #NFDB
849:The subject of so many films is the protection of the victim, and I think, I don't give a damn about those things. It's not the job of films to nurse people. With what's happening in the chemistry of love, I don't want to be a nurse or a doctor, I just want to be an observer."
As a child, Claire Denis wished to be a nurse; she is no longer a child. Years have passed and soon we love this world, so soon we are willing to coexist with dust in our eyes. ~ Claudia Rankine,#NFDB
850:The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry ; a science for which this race created a new era.(...) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science. ~ Alexander von Humboldt, #NFDB
851:Everything that goes into making a film, when it's the finished product, us as the actors look at the film and go: "Oh man, OK, on that day we were doing whatever the circumstances were on that day...." So much goes into it and it's all so incredibly calculated that the behind-the-scenes chemistry that exists between all of us is sometimes forgotten - you can't act that. We've all come together and held hands through each of the processes that I've been a part of. ~ Chris Klein, #NFDB
852:On the terrace of the Pepiniere, the 150 pupils of the Institut Chemique talk chemistry as they leave the auditoria and the laboratory. The echoes of the magnificent public garden of the city of Nancy make the words reverberate; coupling, condensation, grignardization. Moreover, their clothes stay impregnated with strong and characteristic odours; we follow the initiates of Hermes by their scent. In such an environment, how is it possible not to be productive? ~ Victor Grignard, #NFDB
853:Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
854:Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
855:The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune. ~ David Thomson, #NFDB
856:Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise. Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
857:I could hold you prisoner here for the rest of the day and list everything I love about you, but that’s only half of it,” he explained, turning toward me. “The other half is something I can’t put into words. Something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. It’s something that ties me to you, and you to me. Call it chemistry, call it fate, call it whatever you want. All I know is that I’m yours just as much as you’re mine, Luce. That’s the surest thing I’ve ever known. ~ Nicole Williams, #NFDB
858:The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
859:When you're angry, you can't fight rationally. Your body chemistry is all messed up. Your energy goes to all the wrong places. You can't do anything well except get angrier. That's why I like fighting guys who are pumped up on steroids. Fighting is all about relaxing and releasing tension, so your body is flexible and fluid, able to bend and flex quickly, like water. I like fighting angry guys who are really tense. They can't think right, and they can't fight right. ~ Frank Shamrock, #NFDB
860:Experiments in geology are far more difficult than in physics and chemistry because of the greater size of the objects, commonly outside our laboratories, up to the earth itself, and also because of the fact that the geologic time scale exceeds the human time scale by a million and more times. This difference in time allows only direct observations of the actual geologic processes, the mind having to imagine what could possibly have happened in the past. ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, #NFDB
861:I don't know anything about chemistry, but I know that there's a whole world of chemistry, of professional chemists. They have their prizes, they have their publications, they have their work. Just because I don't know about it, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. A lot of people say, "Isn't poetry in trouble today?" Or: "Nobody really reads poetry anymore." And I say, "You're crazy." There's a huge world of poetry out there. You may not know about it, but it's there. ~ Barbara Hamby, #NFDB
862:Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
863:I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy, leads me to wish for my wife again. How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry-the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules-is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
864:Dictionaries, manuals, grammars, study guides and topic notes, classical authors and the entire book trade in de Viris, Quintus-Curtius, Sallust, and Livy peacefully crumbled to dust on the shelves of the old Hachette publishing house; but introductions to mathematics, textbooks on civil engineering, mechanics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, courses in commerce, finance, industrial arts- whatever concerned the market tendencies of the day - sold by the millions of copies. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
865:In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants. If the sparks don’t fly from the beginning, they never will. If he doesn’t get your sense of humor from the first conversation, you’ll always secretly be looking for someone who does. And if a guy can’t see restaurant servers as real people, with needs and dreams and crappy jobs, then I don’t want to be with him, even if he just won the Pulitzer Prize. ~ Rhoda Janzen, #NFDB
866:I would... establish the conviction that Chemistry, as an independent science, offers one of the most powerful means towards the attainment of a higher mental cultivation; that the study of Chemistry is profitable, not only inasmuch as it promotes the material interests of mankind, but also because it furnishes us with insight into those wonders of creation which immediately surround us, and with which our existence, life, and development, are most closely connected. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
867:The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes.
Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning. ~ Neil Postman,#NFDB
868:As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important. However, you have to go by the script because it's related to production, otherwise you will not finish your project. My background are acting, film production, directing, and I studied them for many years. Keep in mind that you need many other skills when you are starting any film project related to real life. ~ Tommy Wiseau, #NFDB
869:The chemistry was almost too much. And at the same time, not enough. She simply couldn’t get enough of him, wondered if she ever would.
When he pulled back and slid into her again, she moaned his name. “Sawyer.”
Her clit was pulsing, begging to be touched again. Feeling bold, she reached between her legs and started stroking herself as he began thrusting.
“Oh yeah, touch yourself, sweetheart. Come on my dick,” he rasped out, his voice a bare whisper… ~ Katie Reus,#NFDB
870:Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid. ~ Primo Levi, #NFDB
871:Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
872:All that's known is this: there is no central processor, no single computer. Nothing that simple. Millions of neurons process information simultaneously and in parallel, not linearly, but the actual chemistry and electrical properties of that integrative process are still being mapped. Even so, it seems odd that during the evolution of brain circuitry and thinking, the ability to understand itself did not get wired in. Such built-in innocence seems like a terrible oversight. ~ Gretel Ehrlich, #NFDB
873:I don't like the idea of killing people, either. I don't even like chemistry."
"What do you like?"
"Music. Numbers. Equations. They're not like words. They ... they don't get mixed up."
"If only you could talk to girls in equations."
There was a long silence, and then, eyes trained on the notch they'd created in the link, Wylan said, "Just girls?"
Jesper restrained a grin. "No. Not just girls." It really was a shame they were all probably going to die tonight. ~ Leigh Bardugo,#NFDB
874:Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,--and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
875:Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
876:I told them that when I heard Billy was bright, an artist and musician, and when I heard that he loved his family and loved people through difficulty in relationships, and when I heard that he struggled with heroin and booze addictions and an unhelpful brain chemistry, and when I heard that he was beautifully queer and passionate and sometimes played piano in his sister’s dresses, I knew. I knew that Billy was pretty much exactly the kind of person Jesus would hang out with. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
877:I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
878:Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. —Diane Ackerman ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
879:So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
880:More important than any one new application is the new 'materials' concept itself. It marks a shift from concern with substances to concern with structures, a shift from artisan to scientist as man's artificer, a shift from chemistry to physics as the basic discipline, and a shift, above all, from the concrete experience of the workshop to abstract mathematics, a shift from starting with what nature provides to what man wants to accomplish.
-The Age of Discontinuity, 1969 ~ Peter F Drucker,#NFDB
881:we can identify the causes of these revolutions, they’re highly varied: glaciation in the case of the end-Ordovician extinction, global warming and changes in ocean chemistry at the end of the Permian, an asteroid impact in the final seconds of the Cretaceous. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but “one weedy species.” As Walter Alvarez put it to me, “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
882:See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry. ~ Manuel Rivas, #NFDB
883:So when people ask me about why we’re suffering from what appears to be an epidemic of depression despite the number of people taking antidepressants, I don’t think about brain chemistry. I turn to the impact of our sedentary lifestyles, processed food diets, and unrelenting stress. I turn to the medical literature that says a typical Western diet—high in refined carbs, unnatural fats, and foods that create chaos in our blood sugar balance—contribute to higher levels of inflammation.19 ~ Kelly Brogan, #NFDB
884:And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
885:Recent studies have considered the detection of a spaceship visiting our parish of the galaxy. In my opinion that last thought should bring a blush to every human cheek... Fecklessness might be the main theme of the aliens' report on the new-found source of radio pollution ... that emanates from beings who have mastered a lot of physics, chemistry and biology and yet let their children starve-while all around their planet the energy of their mother star runs to waste in a desert of space. ~ Nigel Calder, #NFDB
886:When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
887:I notice that, in the lecture … which Prof. Lowry gave recently, in Paris … he brought forward certain freak formulae for tartaric acid, in which hydrogen figures as bigamist … I may say, he but follows the loose example set by certain Uesanians, especially one G. N. Lewis, a Californian thermodynamiter, who has chosen to disregard the fundamental canons of chemistry—for no obvious reason other than that of indulging in premature speculation upon electrons as the cause of valency ~ Henry Edward Armstrong, #NFDB
888:Paranormal activity cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment and therefore cannot be studied as closely as a natural science, like chemistry or biology. So the inability to replicate the phenomena makes verification and categorization of paranormal events very difficult and erodes the credibility of the science. After all, if we could summon spirits of the departed consistently and reliably in order to study them, there would be a whole new market in trans-dimensional communications. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
889:And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
890:The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
891:We can change our thinking. Rather than viewing the chemical adulteration of our environment and our bodies as the inevitable practice of convenience and progress, we can decide that cancer is inconvenient and toxic pollution archaic and primitive. We can start seeing the creation of carcinogens as the result of outmoded technologies. We can demand green engineering and green chemistry. We can let our systems of industry and agriculture know that they are suffering from a design flaw. ~ Sandra Steingraber, #NFDB
892:I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
893:The alchemical tradition assumes that every physical art or science is a body of knowledge which exists only because it is ensouled by invisible powers and processes. Physical chemistry, as it is practiced in the modern world, is concerned principally with pharmaceutical or industrial research projects. It is confined within the boundaries of an all-pervading materialism, which binds labor to the advancement of physical objectives. ~ Manly Palmer Hall, in Meditation Symbols in Eastern and Western Mysticism, #NFDB
894:In an ever-more complex world, Mandelbrot argues, scientists need both tools: image as well as number, the geometric view as well as the analytic. The two should work together. Visual geometry is like an experienced doctor's savvy in reading a patient's complexion, charts, and X-rays. Precise analysis is like the medical test results-the raw numbers of blood pressure and chemistry. "A good doctor looks at both, the pictures and the numbers. Science needs to work that way too," he says. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot, #NFDB
895:Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again? ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
896:What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
897:What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
898:Any of the components of an organism-say, a haemoglobin molecule-can be given an arbitrarily complete and precise description in the language of atomic physics or chemistry, and yet this description will miss something that is nevertheless materially relevant to its structure and its very existence. Specifically, it will provide no hint of why this highly improbable molecular configuration is so prevalent, as compared with the astronomical number of molecular forms that are not present. Haemoglobin, ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
899:But the irony: Don't I often want to desperately wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness--I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image? ~ Ann Voskamp, #NFDB
900:Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
901:column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
902:boxes. We have chemistry. If we both ignored my inability to love him, I could fit into his life nicely. He’s rich and driven, and every time he looks at me, I know what he sees. A pretty fuck. A prize to be won. A match. But I’m not on vacation. I’m running away. The urge to thrust myself into a future unknown was so powerful, it landed me in Rio. In the center of this chaos is exactly where I want to be—until I can find the truth. But the truth is like this overwhelming place. It’s much easier to get lost ~ Meredith Wild, #NFDB
903:What she did NOT appreciate was the homework. Captain Wilkes had scrounged textbooks for her to study. Not just Marine manuals, either. Math, science, English. Chemistry. Yuck! With weekly tests. And he was making her do all her platoon reports, then “annotating” them. He had given her a dictionary and thesaurus, among other things, and after the first report after giving them to her told her she was “not allowed words of more than two syllables.” It was worse than fucking school. “Recess” was killing zombies. ~ John Ringo, #NFDB
904:When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
905:There had been a time when words had been the only place he could find solace. No book ever lost patience with him or told him to sit still. When his tutors had thrown up their hands in frustration, it was the library that had taught Nikolai military history, strategy, chemistry, astronomy. Each spine had been an open door away whispering, Come in, come in. Here is the land you’ve never seen before. Here is a place to hide when you’re frightened, to play when you’re bored, to rest when the world seems unkind. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
906:Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We've put our birthright at risk because we don't know how to control ourselves. Our lust. ~ Stephen Markley, #NFDB
907:Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds. ~ Donald Cram, #NFDB
908:Alan Rocke's Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule's daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation. ~ Roald Hoffmann, #NFDB
909:By the 1950s, the renamed facility at Auschwitz-Oswiecim was the hub of coal-based chemistry in the Silesian region. The plant also survived the fall of Communism and is today the third-largest producer of synthetic rubber in Europe, with capacity equal to roughly 5 per cent of global consumption. As of 2003, at least two of the world's leading tyre manufacturers source their rubber from the plant at Oswiecim, the foundations for which were laid in 1941, when Carl Krauch received his largest-ever allocation of steel. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
910:The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself, then the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
911:Chemistry was transformed by glass perhaps more than any other discipline. You only have to go to any chemistry lab to see that the transparency and inertness of the material make it perfect for mixing chemicals and monitoring what they do. Before the glass test tube was born, chemical reactions were performed in opaque beakers, so it was hard to see what was happening. With glass, and especially with a new glass called Pyrex that was immune to thermal shock, chemistry as a systematic discipline really got going. ~ Mark Miodownik, #NFDB
912:Can you name a single one of the great fundamental and original intellectual achievements which have raise man in the scale of civilization that may be credited to the Anglo-Saxon? The art of letters, of poetry, of music, of sculpture, of painting, of the drama, of architecture; the science of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, of logic, of physics, of chemistry, the use of the metals and principles of mechanics, were all invented or discovered by darker and what we now call inferior races and nations. ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
913:Boring," the director said. "Could we create a little more chemistry?"
Graham gritted his teeth. The guy might be brilliant, but he had an annoying habit of constantly saying "we" when he meant "you", and Graham was pretty sure chemistry wasn't something you could just create anyway; it was either there or it wasn't, and with Olivia, it wasn't. Yet somehow, even though there were two people involved in the kiss, Graham was the only one getting a lecture. Still, he nodded gamely, and set himself up to try again. ~ Jennifer E Smith,#NFDB
914:There is no agreement on the extent to which metabolism could develop independently of a genetic material. In my opinion, there is no basis in known chemistry for the belief that long sequences of reactions can organize spontaneously -- and every reason to believe that they cannot. The problem of achieving sufficient specificity, whether in aqueous solution or on the surface of a mineral, is so severe that the chance of closing a cycle of reactions as complex as the reverse citric acid cycle, for example, is negligible. ~ Leslie Orgel, #NFDB
915:Alchemy was... the sickly but imaginative infancy through which modern chemistry had to pass before it attained its majority [i.e.,] became a positive science. The search for gold was only one crisis in this infancy. This crisis is over, and alchemy is now a thing of the past. There is no longer any need to exhort adventurous spirits, who hope to find Golconda at the bottom of their crucibles, to leave such visions and turn to the safer paths of science or industry. The battle has been fought and won... ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
916:Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to do with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a substance, or the way it was transformed in chemical reactions, never forgot anything he read, or was told, about the phenomena of chemistry. He seemed indifferent, or inattentive, to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena-noticing everything, forgetting nothing-that constituted Scheele's special strength. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
917:We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
918:We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have to
do is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you know
all this," he concluded, subdued. ~ Stanis aw Lem,#NFDB
919:All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition. ~ Mo Yan, #NFDB
920:The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
921:He was the bane of her existence. He didn't deserve one second of her precious time. She knew that. Of course she knew that. If anyone knew what kind of pull Jack had on her, it was Lexi. She hated it more than anyone in this moment. It was the whole reason she had left Atlanta a year ago. She had to get away from him…to try and leave him behind. But that didn't just kill her affection for him. She didn't stop desiring him because of it. They had a connection, a chemistry that she had no idea how to explain to the outside world. ~ K A Linde, #NFDB
922:I learned a valuable lesson that day. And an enduring one, too, because it resonates with me still. Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down. ~ Marina Chapman, #NFDB
923:In October 1957, the first Russian Sputnik orbited the earth. In November, the second Sputnik, carrying the space dog Laika, was sent into space. That same year, a German astronomer published a definitive catalog of planets and stars. Four out of the five Nobel Prize laureates in Physics and Chemistry that year were from countries other than the United States. Americans were terrified that the country was falling behind in math and science, so nationwide there was a renewed commitment to education, especially in those fields. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
924:the Sun completed the last couple of degrees in its most recent arc around the Milky Way, another type of evolution evolved here on Earth, one perhaps again as profoundly new as the origin of life: the origin of culture, a meta-biological way for ideas to propagate, accumulate, persevere, and evolve. Under this influence the biosphere has been morphing into something else entirely: something with electric lights and angst about the future; something that does comedy, chemistry, and cosmology and asks a lot of questions. One ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
925:In a nation committed to better living through chemistry - where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women - the national pastime has a problem of illicit chemical enhancement. Steroids threaten the health of the 5 percent to 7 percent of players proved, by a mild regime of scheduled tests, to be using them. Steroids also endanger emulative young people. Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling - fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history. ~ George Will, #NFDB
926:Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don't, and you better have it, or it's like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you dont even know at first what they're even selling. Or those menues without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don't mean money. What I'm saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point. ~ Deb Caletti, #NFDB
927:Religion and science, for example, are often thought to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists. Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
928:Everything feels right with her. I can’t explain it. The world just stops. Everything freezes. It’s me. It’s her. It’s just us. Everything else, every molecule, including the oxygen we breathe, is only secondary to the chemistry we create. When we watch a movie it’s more than images strung together in the form of mindless entertainment. It’s an experience. An experience we share together from making the popcorn to watching the film to talking about it for days after. Chemistry. What more can I say? You either have it or you don’t. ~ Marilyn Grey, #NFDB
929:The element carbon can be found in more kinds of molecules than the sum of all other kinds of molecules combined. Given the abundance of carbon in the cosmos—forged in the cores of stars, churned up to their surfaces, and released copiously into the galaxy—a better element does not exist on which to base the chemistry and diversity of life. Just edging out carbon in abundance rank, oxygen is common, too, forged and released in the remains of exploded stars. Both oxygen and carbon are major ingredients of life as we know it. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
930:We were brought up in the school that teaches: You do what the script tells you. Deliver the goods without comment. Live it-do it-or shut up. After all, the writer is what's important. If the script is good and you don't get in its way, it will come off okay. I never discussed a script with Spence [Spencer Tracy]; we just did it. The same with Hank [Henry Fonda] in On Golden Pond. Naturally and unconsciously we joined into what I call a musical necessity-the chemistry that brings out the essence of the characters and the work. ~ Katharine Hepburn, #NFDB
931:As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study. ~ John Jacob Abel, #NFDB
932:Human use of fossil fuels is altering the chemistry of the atmosphere; oceans are polluted and depleted of fish; 80 per cent of Earth's forests are heavily impacted or gone yet their destruction continues. An estimated 50,000 species are driven to extinction each year. We dump millions of tonnes of chemicals, most untested for their biological effects, and many highly toxic, into air, water and soil. We have created an ecological holocaust. Our very health and survival are at stake, yet we act as if we have plenty of time to respond. ~ David Suzuki, #NFDB
933:The desire to overcome physical limitations by magic manipulations owed as much to the mind as chemistry did to the alchemist's furnace: so impetuous, so willful, so insistent, was this desire that it sometimes tempted the alchemists to fake the result by hiding a pellet of gold in the ashes. But this subjective impulse to transcend the limitations of 'matter' has turned out to be closer to reality than the well-grounded inhibitions against it: the alchemists' dream, we now realize, pointed to the ultimate miracle of nuclear fission. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
934:For chemistry is no science form'd à priori; 'tis no production of the human mind, framed by reasoning and deduction: it took its rise from a number of experiments casually made, without any expectation of what follow'd; and was only reduced into an art or system, by collecting and comparing the effects of such unpremeditated experiments, and observing the uniform tendency thereof. So far, then, as a number of experimenters agree to establish any undoubted truth; so far they may be consider'd as constituting the theory of chemistry. ~ Herman Boerhaave, #NFDB
935:If Boston College didn’t offer them both a commitment though, T.J. would rather go where they could play together. They had great chemistry as linemates with every rush up the ice.
Brad was fast, strong on the boards, won battles in the corners and possessed solid forechecking skills. He had that magical ability to score and create plays for his teammates, making him the type of winger that coaches sought.
Their friends called it twin telepathy the way they killed penalties together and always knew where the other would be. ~ Stacy Juba,#NFDB
936:True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests valyes and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
937:Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
938:If you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers. ~ Paul Saffo, #NFDB
939:Recent evidence in the field of cardiology has shown that the nature of a patient’s emotional ties drastically affects whether or not this patient will get heart disease. Experiments have shown that a patient’s blood chemistry changes when that patient has a bitter thought. Doctors are now including, in their treatment of heart patients, training in becoming more loving and trusting. A person’s ability to love and connect with others lays the foundation for both psychological and physical health. This research illustrates that when we are in a ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
940:With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you! ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
941:But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double. ~ Daniel Suarez, #NFDB
942:One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary-to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
943:Say you’ll go caving this weekend.” The leather coat crinkled and moved as he tried to move closer to me than the seat belt would allow. He could have reached out and touched me. Part of me wanted him to, which was sort of embarrassing all on its own. I started to say no, then realized I wanted to say yes. Which was silly. But I was enjoying sitting in the dark with the smell of leather and cologne. Call it chemistry, instant lust, whatever. I liked Richard. He flipped my switch. It had been a long time since I had liked anybody. Jean-Claude ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
944:In the Gaia theory air, water, and soil are major components of one central organism, planet Earth. What we typically think of as life - the plants and animals that inhabit the earth - has evolved merely to regulate the chemistry of the biosphere. Humans are insignificant participants, far less important to the life cycle than termites. Even the imbalance that we have created by adding massive quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere may be brought back to acceptable levels by other organisms functioning in their capacity to correct excesses. ~ David Easton, #NFDB
945:There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
946:For example, there are numbers of chemists who occupy themselves exclusively with the study of dyestuffs. They discover facts that are useful to scientific chemistry; but they do not rank as genuine scientific men. The genuine scientific chemist cares just as much to learn about erbium-the extreme rarity of which renders it commercially unimportant-as he does about iron. He is more eager to learn about erbium if the knowledge of it would do more to complete his conception of the Periodic Law, which expresses the mutual relations of the elements. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
947:My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics--a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
948:Oh! science! It has reconsidered everything. For thebody and the soul − the viaticum − we now have medicineand philosophy, old wives’ remedies and rearranged popular songs. And the diversions of princes and games they forbade! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry . . . Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why would it cease to turn? It is the vision of numbers. We are moving towards Spirit. What I say is certain, oracular. I understand, but not knowing how to explain myself without using pagan words, I prefer to hold my tongue. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
949:If I remember rightly, you on one occasion defined my limits in a very precise fashion."
"Yes," [Watson] answered, laughing. "It was a singular document. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mudstains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points of my analysis. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
950:Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compatibilities and tastes; on a respect for measurement, balance, chemistry and heat; on a history of countless errors overcome. ~ Julia Glass, #NFDB
951:To Learn is to create. Learning- whether it is programming, mathematics, art, music, poetry, biology, or chemistry- is all about breaking down walls and freeing the one thing that kept us alive: knowledge.
Knowledge expands freedom in all its forms. Knowledge breaks down walls. It liberates the oppressed. We are committed to knowledge. Knowledge as a hammer against classism, against sexism, against racism, against gender discrimination, against slavery, against bigotry, against war, against hatred. If there is darkness in the world, we will light it up. ~ Leopoldo Gout,#NFDB
952:In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
953:Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
954:We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach’s help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. ~ Judith Curry, #NFDB
955:Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
956:The question whether atoms exist or not... belongs rather to metaphysics. In chemistry we have only to decide whether the assumption of atoms is an hypothesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena... whether a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowledge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena... I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a mathematico-mechanical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weight, of atomicity, and of numerous other properties of the so-called atoms. ~ August Kekule, #NFDB
957:Humanity cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation; life does not come from crystals; poetry does not come from donkeys; international peace does not come from wars; social justice does not come from selfishness. With all our knowledge of chemistry we cannot make a human life in our laboratories because we lack the unifying, vivifying principal of a soul which comes only from God. Life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. It is not the result of the necessary ascent of man but the loving descent of God. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
958:But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
959:The housecleaning our bodies perform while we sleep is powered by the shakti that energizes the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and autonomous nervous systems to send instructions to the lymphatic system, the pituitary gland, and a host of other places in our slumbering forms. Whether it is blood circulating in the veins and arteries, a nerve impulse jumping a synaptic gap in the brain, our body straining while running the hundred-meter dash, or the working out of a physics or organic chemistry problem, our shakti provides the energy to accomplish the activity. ~ Thomas Ashley Farrand, #NFDB
960:Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she’d begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even—people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets—was made up of a combination of these elements. “Isn’t it amazing to think of, Ruthie?” he’d asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that. ~ Jennifer McMahon, #NFDB
961:For the first half of 7th grade, I was so distracted by a new middle school and a huge batch of new classmates and friends that I barely noticed that I hadn’t worked much.
I was grateful not to be working, in fact, because I didn’t want to miss a minute of my new life.
I moved from class to class, mixing with different kids every period. I had eight teachers instead of one, a whole range of new subjects to dig into, like chemistry and Spanish. And then there was a brand-new selection of boys. The student body was almost 10 times the size of my old school. ~ Melissa Francis,#NFDB
962:What would I even do with a guy like Boyd? He’s probably into crazy shit like having sex with the lights on. It’s just… I swear I felt something when we met. The moment he walked into the room on Sunday the energy changed. Granted I was about to be questioned by the FBI, so that might have had something to do with the energy in the room, but I don’t know. The problem with chemistry is that it’s not always reciprocated. Sometimes one person is picturing Hollywood-worthy wall sex and the other person is thinking about what they should pick up for dinner on the way home from work. ~ Jana Aston, #NFDB
963:Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That's not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it. ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
964:I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive. When we first met, you told me that a disguise is always a self portrait, how true of you, the combination to your safe – your measurements. But this is far more intimate. This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head. You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof. ~ Mark Gatiss, #NFDB
965:It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-called Four Amigos were bonded by personal chemistry. But they also recognized that in predominantly white Seattle, they were stronger together. ~ Eric Liu, #NFDB
966:Depending on their size and temperament, they were—and are—capable of delivering a joy I rarely accessed elsewhere. The mere sight of a doe-eyed golden retriever puppy or a massive, Sphinx-like Leonberger can temporarily alter my brain chemistry. To encounter a Great Pyrenees or a malamute feels to me like meeting a unicorn. That such creatures roam in our midst seems nothing short of magical. That such creatures might share our beds or lie on the sofa with us while we watch TV seems like proof that heaven is capable of dipping down and grazing the earth with the tip of its toe. ~ Meghan Daum, #NFDB
967:Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...
Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?
It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent. ~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
968:The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it. To receive that science it is necessary to purify and renew one's inner self, and so before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one's self. And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that God has implanted in our souls. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
969:There are people we meet in life who miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or a different emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenge or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever they are, we are not and vice versa. Two trains going in different directions that pass for a few powerful moments at full speed, blasting noise and wind but then they are gone. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t. ~ Jonathan Carroll, #NFDB
970:If cathedrals had been universities If dungeons of the Inquisition had been laboratories If Christians had believed in character instead of creed If they had taken from the bible only that which is GOOD and thrown away the wicked and absurd If temple domes had been observatories If priests had been philosophers If missionaries had taught useful arts instead of bible lore If astrology had been astronomy If the black arts had been chemistry If superstition had been science If religion had been humanity The world then would be a heaven filled with love, and liberty and joy ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
971:We speak erroneously of "artificial" materials, "synthetics", and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is "man-made", ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
972:...60 advocates of unorthodox therapies whose credentials are given in the ACS book (above).(:) Of these 60, thirty-nine or almost two-thirds, hold...medical degrees from such universities as Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Yale, Dublin, Oxford, or Toronto. Two are osteopaths. 3...also hold...(PhD's)....scientific....reputable....8 others received PhD's in such fields as chemistry, physiology, bacteriology, parasitology, or medical physics, from...Yale, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and NYU. Thus over 75%...are medical doctors or doctors of philosophy in scientific areas. ~ Ralph W Moss, #NFDB
973:Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.
He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.
Extradition job with one caveat: kill the extraditee. ~ James Ellroy,#NFDB
974:Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation. ~ James Joseph Sylvester, #NFDB
975:One day at Princeton, I noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings, where very large trees were. It turns out it was DDT. At the time, in the early '50s, no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. I went down to the Daily Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story. They said, "Naw, there's nothing wrong." But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded. Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, you are not going to apply what you know. ~ Ralph Nader, #NFDB
976:Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, was to simulate the conditions on Earth in primordial times, three or four billion years ago, when life appeared for the first time. The experiments were intended to see if they could make something come alive using nothing but nonliving chemicals. Do you know what emerged? Not life, but something fascinating all the same. The chemicals gave rise to significant chemical compounds: a handful of amino acids, essential components in the chemistry of life. Amino acids are molecules that hook together to form the proteins that run almost every aspect of biology. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
977:Gin and whiskey are chemistry, carefully formulated and distilled to create a single repeatable experiment in intoxication, the same precise flavor and effect across the brand, bottle after bottle, glass after glass. Wine, on the other hand, is like religion: it’s mysterious, sometimes literally opaque, and there are too many kinds of it. You never really know if a particular wine is good or bad; you just have to take it on faith from some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries. And wine is also like religion because the people who really get into it tend to be fucking unbearable. ~ John Hodgman, #NFDB
978:When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from that neural activity. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
979:Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again? So it is with good reason that most of us meet this dangerous interstice with a sense of foreboding. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
980:The highest wisdom is founded not on reason only, not on those worldly sciences, of physics, history, chemistry, etc., into which knowledge of the intellect is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom knows but one science-the science of the whole, the science that explains the whole creation and the place of man in it. To instil this science into one's soul, it is needful to purify and renew one's inner man, and so, before one can know, one must believe and be made perfect. And for the attainment of these aims there has been put into our souls the light of God, called conscience. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
981:It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive. ~ Frederick Gowland Hopkins, #NFDB
982:The basic sciences of anatomy, physiology, biology, and chemistry are linked to a patient at the bedside through very specific stories that doctors learn and eventually create. These stories, what researchers now call illness scripts, contain key characteristics of a disease to form an iconic version, an idealized model of that particular disease. … It is the story that every doctor puts together for herself with the knowledge she gains from books and patients. The more experience a doctor has with any of these illnesses, the richer and more detailed the illness script she has of the disease becomes. ~ Lisa Sanders, #NFDB
983:As we stepped forth side by side into the darkness, toward the waiting car, I thought of what a strange world it was, where life was lived pressed so tightly cheek to cheek with death: with so little space between, that they might well be one and the same thing.
But in the end, when you stop to think about it, we are, after all, no more than mere particles of dust, drifting alone together through eternity, and so it is pleasant to think that we have—in this way or that, for better or for worse—reached out and touched one another.
That, in the end, is what chemistry is all about, isn't it? ~ Alan Bradley,#NFDB
984:We see Nature combining molecules and cells in the living body to construct separate individuals, and the same Nature, stubbornly pursuing the same course but on a higher level, combining individuals in social organisms to obtain a higher order of psychic results. The processes of chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the social sphere. This accounts for the tendency, which has been insufficiently noted, of every living phylum (insect and vertebrate) to group itself towards its latter end in socialized communities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind, #NFDB
985:She had lived in eight different countries growing up and had visited dozens of others. To most people, this sounded cool, and in some ways, Ayers knows, it was cool, or parts of it were. But since humans are inclined to want what they don't have, she longed to live in America, preferably the solid, unchanging, undramatic Midwest, and attend a real high school, the kind shown in movies, complete with a football team, cheerleaders, pep rallies, chemistry labs, summer reading lists, hall passes, proms, detentions, assemblies, fund-raisers, lockers, Spanish clubs, marching bands, and the dismissal bell. ~ Elin Hilderbrand, #NFDB
986:The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don’t know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol! ~ Bruno Latour, #NFDB
987:the groundbreakers in many sciences were devout believers. Witness the accomplishments of Nicolaus Copernicus (a priest) in astronomy, Blaise Pascal (a lay apologist) in mathematics, Gregor Mendel (a monk) in genetics, Louis Pasteur in biology, Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, John von Neumann in computer science, and Enrico Fermi and Erwin Schrodinger in physics. That’s a short list, and it includes only Roman Catholics; a long list could continue for pages. A roster that included other believers—Protestants, Jews, and unconventional theists like Albert Einstein, Fred Hoyle, and Paul Davies—could fill a book. ~ Scott Hahn, #NFDB
988:He auditioned with Lily, and he and Lily had incredible chemistry that sort of blazed off the scene. I’m just sitting here watching this on my computer, and you know, he was not the only person they’ve ever sent me to look at. I’ve gotten lots of headshots and this and that, and I’m watching the audition and I literally started crying because that was my Jace and Clary on the screen. And it’s an incredible feeling to see that even as an audition. This is amazing. He was snarky funny where he needed to be snarky funny, and he was badass where he needed to be badass. And he and Lily were incredible together ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
989:Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines. ~ John Carreyrou, #NFDB
990:No way you're calling Ben. We already have a plan. Were going to his house, and I'm going to ring the doorbell with some fake lab work for Chemistry, and then Taylor is going to set off his car alarm while I year through his room looking for evidence."
"Wow. Great plan, Kate. Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you planning on doing when he comes back to his room to find you knee-deep in his secret Brotherhood bullshit?" Liam spat his words at me like nails.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Do you have a better idea? Ooh, I know. Maybe you could call you're brother and have him light his garage on fire or something. ~ Lisa Roecker,#NFDB
991:The birds do not sing, clouds remain of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design. ~ John Hawkes, #NFDB
992:Dark myths and suburban legends roam like living things through the halls of Leeds High School, whispered in stairwells over bubblegum-tinted tongues ; scrawled on the wall of the secret room above the auditorium stage ; argued over in the shaded courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria, buoyed on grey-brown clouds of cigarette smoke. There’s the Weird House up on Tremens Terrace, haunted by a trio of cannibalistic fiends with a taste for wayward boys. And the coven of teachers, including Mr. Gauthier (Chemistry) and Miss Knell (English), who cavort with a charred-skin devil in the glass-walled natatorium after dark. ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
993:My secret love, Billy Colbert, had to make up the same test.
Afterward, we left the chemistry lab together. 'Well, it was long,' Billy said, 'but it wasn't hard.'
'I thought it was long *and* hard,' I replied.
'Oh, cut it out, Rachel,' Billy remonstrated. 'If there's one thing I can't stand, it's brains who pretend they suffer just as much as the rest of us.'
'I'm not a brain in chemistry,' I protested. 'If I get good grades in science or math, it's because I work. You're the brain in chemistry. I hate that word, brain, anyway. Everyone has a brain, and they're all about the same size, even a moron's. ~ Barbara Cohen,#NFDB
994:Hi,” I say, stopping right in front of him. “I missed you today in chemistry.”
“I got to school a little late.”
“But you left my house early,” I say, wondering what time he did in fact leave—if he waited until I fell asleep or stayed until the last possible moment.
“I still overslept,” he explains.
“I’m sorry if that was my fault.”
“I think it was your fault.” He smiles wider. “Once I got home, I couldn’t really fall asleep. Too wound up, I guess.”
“Because of all the drama with Adam?”
He shakes his head and touches the side of my face, raising my chin slightly to kiss my lips. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz,#NFDB
995:There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB
996:There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB
997:A person places a drop of DNA from blood onto a tiny chip, and a smartphone snaps a picture and can read out whether a virus is present. The chip is coated with microscopic beads containing quantum dots. Each bead is coated with a material designed to recognize a particular strand of DNA — for instance, a sequence that is specific to a hepatitis virus. If there is virus in a blood sample, the DNA will connect to the beads designed to detect hepatitis. If there is HIV in the sample, the DNA will connect instead to the HIV beads. “It really took about 10 years to get the chemistry to work,” Chan says. Next, a cheap laser just ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
998:Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in gormation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
999:Dr. Morris soon recognized that the difference between successful and unsuccessful marriages can often be traced to how well couples are able to "bond" during the courtship period. By bonding he referred to the process by which a man and woman become cemented together emotionally. It describes the chemistry that permits two previous strangers to become intensely valuable to one another. It helps them weather the storms of life and remain committed in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until they are parted in death. It is a phenomenal experience that almost defies description. ~ James C Dobson, #NFDB
1000:Harry huddled up. The cold, raw wind blew right through him as if he were a ghost. These were thoughts he had managed to keep at bay, but now they crowded in on him: if he couldn’t know whether he was capable of cheating on the woman he treasured most in his life, how could he know what else he had done? Aune maintained that drink and drugs merely strengthened or weakened qualities latent within us. But who knew for sure what was inside them? Humans are not robots and the chemistry of the brain changes over time. Who had a full inventory of all the things–given the right circumstances and the wrong medication–we are capable of doing? ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
1001:Which grave are we in?" she said.
"The oldest." She felt Eddie's puzzlement.
"That can't be possible. He looks like he was just buried."
"There must be something at work in the chemistry of the island that's preserving his body. It's like the incorruptibles, bodies that weren't preserved in any special way that don't decay. Catholic saints like Bernadette and Padre Pio are said not to have decomposed even though they died a long, long time ago. Environmental factors can cause a kind of mummification."
Jessica said, or thought, "This is bizarre. I'm getting a lesson on mummification while in the coffin of a dead man. ~ Hunter Shea,#NFDB
1002:Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1003:The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation. ~ Paul Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 (6 April 1929), #NFDB
1004:The end-Permian extinction also seems to have been triggered by a change in the climate. But in this case, the change went in the opposite direction. Right at the time of extinction, 252 million years ago, there was a massive release of carbon into the air—so massive that geologists have a hard time even imagining where all the carbon could have come from. Temperatures soared—the seas warmed by as much as eighteen degrees—and the chemistry of the oceans went haywire, as if in an out-of-control aquarium. The water became acidified, and the amount of dissolved oxygen dropped so low that many organisms probably, in effect, suffocated. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
1005:It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1006:Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ."
"Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle.
"Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine."
"I've heard that story."
"From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do. ~ Manu Joseph,#NFDB
1007:Sweat isn't a bad thing," he said, leaning his head against the wall thoughtfully. "Some of the best things in life happen while your sweating. Yeah, if you get too much of it and it gets old and stale, it turns pretty gross. But on a beautiful women? Intoxicating. If you could smell things like a vampire does, you'd know what I'm talking about. Most people mess it all up and drown themselves in perfume. Perfume can be good...especially if you get one that goes with your chemistry. But you only need a hint. Mix about 20 percent of that with 80 percent of your own perspiration...mmm." He tilted his head to the side and looked at me. "Dead sexy. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
1008:The Influence Factor—Do they influence others? The Capacity Factor—Do they have the potential to grow and develop? The Attitude Factor—Do they desire to grow and develop themselves? The Chemistry Factor—Do we like each other? The Passion Factor—Are they self-motivated? The Character Factor—Are they grounded? The Values Factor—Are our values compatible? The Teamwork Factor—Do they work well with others? The Support Factor—Do they add value to me? The Creative Factor—Can they find possibilities in impossibilities? The Option Factor—Can their contribution give me options? The 10 Percent Factor—Are they in the top 10 percent of those on our team? ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
1009:The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
1010:But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime. ~ Kate Millett, #NFDB
1011:Do you want to know how your chemistry partner is holding up?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Don’t care.” The words almost get stuck in my throat.
She sighs in frustration, then walks over to the window ledge and picks up the chemistry book. “Should I take this back with me, or leave it here?”
I don’t answer.
She puts the book back on the ledge and heads for the door.
“I wish I’d chosen biology instead of chemistry,” I say as she opens the door to leave.
She winks at me knowingly. “No, you don’t. And just so you know, Dr. Aguirre will be coming to visit later today. I’d advise against throwing things at him as he walks through the door. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1012:Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
1013:The ceiling is actually the jungle that keeps most people away from the hidden treasure. And if you’re ready to work on the skills category of your Career Savings Account, this is a tremendous gift. Author Seth Godin calls it the “Dip.” He says, “The Dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out. If you took organic chemistry in college, you’ve experienced the Dip. Academia doesn’t want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen. Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can’t handle organic chemistry, well, then you can’t go to med school.”2 ~ Jon Acuff, #NFDB
1014:Befuddlement is a healthy part of the learning process. When students approach a problem and don’t know how to do it, they’ll often decide they’re no good at the subject. Brighter students, in particular, can have difficulty in this way—their breezing through high school leaves them no reason to think that being confused is normal and necessary. But the learning process is all about working your way out of confusion. Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you’ve figured out what’s confusing, you’re likely to have answered the question yourself!” —Kenneth R. Leopold, Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota ~ Barbara Oakley, #NFDB
1015:healing is the result of not just clinical processes but also of overall biological potentialities that often do not materialize without the unseen power of spiritual alignment. Chemistry is within the predictable Newtonian discipline of scientific (linear content) expectation, but health recovery is greatly facilitated by the unseen power of the spiritual dimensions of intentionality of consciousness itself (nonlinear context). The clinical power and influential impact of spiritual context is overwhelmingly displayed by the millions of recoveries from medically hopeless illnesses as exhibited by worldwide membership in faith-based organizations of which Alcoholics Anonymous ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
1016:People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the generation of trees from seeds - a mystery "infinitely beyond" the reach of science. (Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond. Lord Kelvin certainly had felt a huge emotional charge from not knowing something.) Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
1017:It is the equivalent of a “phase change” in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction and complexity out of more and more things and provide interactive one-touch solutions, all kinds of human-to-human and business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions move from solids to liquids, from slow to fast, from their complexity being a burden and full of friction to their complexity becoming invisible and frictionless. And so whatever you want to move, compute, analyze, or communicate can be done with less effort. As ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
1018:And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League... Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry set, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1019:There was some kind of X-men emergency, so all the teachers were gone. This happens every now and then. It's one of the perks of having super heroes for your teachers - when the world is about to end (which is like at least twice a month), school gets canceled. Heck, three weeks ago there was a big chemistry final for the upperclassmen. Beast was the teacher - he's this big, burly guy who can do acrobatic stuff like a monkey, but he also happens to be a super-genius. He's, like, legendary for his tough finals, so there were kids walking through the halls, going, "Oh, God, please let Galactus try to eat the earth. Please please please let there be an alien invasion by the Skrulls! ~ Barry Lyga, #NFDB
1020:quantities upon: the media couldn't lavish enough praise on the film. (lavish something with) cover something thickly or liberally with: she lavished our son with kisses. lav·ish·ly adv. lav·ish·ness n. late Middle English (as a noun denoting profusion): from Old French lavasse 'deluge of rain', from laver 'to wash', from Latin lavare. La·voi·sier Antoine Laurent (1743-94), French scientist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemistry. law n. 1 (often the law) the system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and may enforce by the imposition of penalties: they were taken to court for breaking the law; a license is required ~ Erin McKean, #NFDB
1021:Scientists who had worked on the atom bomb added their voices to the growing movement. George Kistiakowsky, a Harvard University chemistry professor who had worked on the first atomic bomb, and later was science adviser to President Eisenhower, became a spokesman for the disarmament movement. HIs last public remarks, before his death from cancer at the age of eighty-two, were in an editorial for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist in December 1982. "I tell you as my parting words: Forget the channels. There simply is not enough time left before the world explodes. Concentrate instead on organizing, with so many others of like mind, a mass movement for peace such as there has not been before. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1022:I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science. Instead of losing their motivation when the course got dry or difficult, they said: “I maintained my interest in the material.” “I stayed positive about taking chemistry.” “I kept myself motivated to study.” Even if they thought the textbook was boring or the instructor was a stiff, they didn’t let their motivation evaporate. That just made it all the more important to motivate themselves. ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
1023:They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable. ~ Kate Racculia, #NFDB
1024:Credulity in arts and opinions... is likewise of two kinds viz., when men give too much belief to arts themselves, or to certain authors in any art. The sciences that sway the imagination more than the reason are principally three viz., astrology, natural magic, and alchemy... Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold, buried somewhere in his vineyard; while they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavours to make gold have brought many useful inventions to light. ~ Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) as quoted by Edward Thorpe, History of Chemistry, Vol. 1, p. 43., #NFDB
1025:Biological psychiatry was founded on, and still largely adheres to, the assumption that mental disorders are due to chemical imbalances in the brain. The brain, in this view, is like a delicate soup. To maintain its characteristic flavor, just the right mix of key ingredients is required. Too little or too much of one or another item, and its character is altered. But the normal character can sometimes be restored with the right mix of additional ingredients that either replace a missing ingredient or dampen the effects of an overly abundant one. Like a master chef's, the biological psychiatrist's job is to adjust the blend, to balance the chemistry, so that the desired character is restored. ~ Joseph E LeDoux, #NFDB
1026:I know what love is and it is friendship, set afire.
Love is easy. Love is chemistry—a science lab. Love is as simple as connecting this together with that. Her brilliant eyes and my heated heart.
But this is not love.
Not yet.
Genuine love is friendship. Genuine love resides only in the present moment. Genuine love is everyday. Genuine love feels no need to entertain the space away. Genuine love is up, genuine love is down and yet genuine love never wavers.
Love is something else entire: it is caring. It is arguing, but with curiosity—it is giving an inch when the other is certainly wrong—it is teasing, it is empathy, it is respect, it is admiration each morning. ~ Waylon H Lewis,#NFDB
1027:Using the Mount Wilson Observatory, Harlow Shapley redefined our relationship to the cosmos, showing that the sun was not at the center of the Milky Way. Using it, Edwin Hubble created the whole field of cosmology, redefining again our place in the universe, our understanding of its vastness, and our ideas about its creation. Those discoveries did not bear any direct financial returns. They did not add to the national defense. But they did something far more important: they changed our lives and the way we think about ourselves. They are among the most profound discoveries of science, and they had no financial justification whatsoever. They were seeking truth and beauty amid chemistry and light. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
1028:In these manuscripts chemistry is called the "sacred Art," and the exceedingly obscure and figurative language in which they are written makes it well nigh impossible to separate fact from fancy; Hoefer has indeed attempted to discover modern chemical conceptions in the allusions to Egyptian myths and the chaotic collections of spagyric arcana. ...[E]ach author seems to have aimed to write treatises intelligible only to himself, and we greatly doubt his success in even this respect. ~ Henry Carrington Bolton, "An Address Delivered before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Montreal," (August 23, 1882) The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science, p. 115, Vol. 46, No. 1190 (Sept. 15, 1882)., #NFDB
1029:philosophical inquiries (the reflections of specially trained observers on the nature of their own patterns of thought) or the insights of great novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Those are the readings that inspired my first years at Harvard. But, as I learned from Ernst Kris, neither trained introspection nor creative insights would lead to the systematic accretion of knowledge needed for the foundation of a science of mind. That sort of foundation requires more than insight, it requires experimentation. Thus, it was the remarkable successes of experimental science in astronomy, physics, and chemistry that spurred students of mind to devise experimental ~ Eric R Kandel, #NFDB
1030:English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. “The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin…,” he wrote. “For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure.” In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the “soul” from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1031:Finance is concerned with the relations between the values of securities and their risk, and with the behavior of those values. It aspires to be a practical, like physics or chemistry or electrical engineering. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked about economics, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.” Dentists rely on science, engineering, empirical knowledge, and heuristics, and there are no theorems in dentistry. Similarly, one would hope that nance would be concerned with laws rather than theorems, with behavior rather than assumptions. One doesn’t seriously describe the behavior of a market with theorems. ~ Emanuel Derman, #NFDB
1032:He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.* The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry—the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1033:Shapiro concludes his twenty-three-page paper with this remarkable statement . . . The take-home lesson of more than half a century of molecular microbiology is to recognize that bacterial information processing is far more powerful than human technology. . . . These small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere’s geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics, and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives.21 ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
1034:According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, gene activity can change on a daily basis. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body, and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the blood’s chemistry, then you can literally change the fate of your cells by altering your thoughts.
In fact, Dr. Lipton’s research illustrates that by changing your perception, your mind can alter the activity of your genes and create over thirty thousand variations of products from each gene. He gives more detail by saying that the gene programs are contained within the nucleus of the cell, and you can rewrite those genetic programs through changing your blood chemistry. ~ Bruce H Lipton,#NFDB
1035:For all the tantalizing and provocative character of the Viking results, I know a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites. The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry and biology. Prototypes of such rovers are under development by NASA. They know on their own how to go over rocks, how not to fall down ravines, how to get out of tight spots. It is within our capability to land a rover on Mars that could scan its surroundings, see the most interesting place in its field of view and, by the same time tomorrow, be there. Every day a new place, a complex, winding traverse over the varied topography of this appealing planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1036:Different kinds of gases (e.g., gases based on different chemical elements) absorb different spectral colors. So if one has a gas of unknown composition, one can deduce what it's made of by seeing what light it absorbs! In the language of our generalized chemistry, the message of Fraunhofer's dark lines, as interpreted by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, is that a given atom of substance will combine with-that is, absorb-only specific elements of light-that is, spectral colors-while ignoring others. There is also a converse effect, that heated gas will emit light in preferential colors, creating bright lines in the spectrum. Altogether, these dark and bright lines are like fingerprints identifying the responsible substances. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
1037:But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers had but fumbled and hinted. ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1038:Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required: say, the interplay of enzymes in a cell, of many mental processes conscious and unconscious, the structure and dynamics of social systems and the like. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, #NFDB
1039:For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old. And if they are allowed to recover, it will take them almost a week to get back to their 30-year-old systems. Taken together, these studies show that sleep loss cripples thinking in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affects manual dexterity, including fine motor control, and even gross motor movements, such as the ability to walk on a treadmill. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
1040:...the Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an auto-catalytic process. In chemistry the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzyme. Some chemical reactions produce a product that also acts as a catalyst, so that the speed of the reaction starts from nothing an then runs away as some product is formed, catalyzing and driving the reaction faster and producing more product which drives the reaction still faster. Such a chain reaction is termed auto-catalytic, the prime example being the explosion of an atomic bomb when neutrons in a critical mass of uranium split uranium nuclei to release energy plus more neutrons, which split still more nuclei. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
1041:Ellen drank long and deep from her water bottle and wiped her mouth with her gauntleted arm. "Are you feeling all right, Jack? Your play's flat, all in all. I was hoping to give Seph more of a show."
Jack tested the edge of his blade with his thumb. "Actually, Ellen, I wondered if you were coming down with something. You were downright lethargic. I nearly dozed off once or twice."
"Well, that explains it. You looked like you were asleep."
With that, they threw down their weapons and it dissolved into a wrestling match. In the end they were kissing each other.
It was certainly a different kind of courtship, but there was a chemistry, an understanding, a kinship between Jack and Ellen that Seph envied. ~ Cinda Williams Chima,#NFDB
1042:We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. We both use nucleic acids for heredity; we both use proteins as enzymes to control the chemistry of our cells. Most significantly, we both use precisely the same code book for translating nucleic acid information into protein information, as do virtually all the other creatures on the planet.* The usual explanation of this molecular unity is that we are, all of us—trees and people, angler fish and slime molds and paramecia—descended from a single and common instance of the origin of life in the early history of our planet. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1043:In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their care was not necessarily to save the body (which would, of course, be wonderful) but to help save the soul by allowing patients to know the hour of their death, and prepare for it. This was itself a genuine medical skill and, again, one that depended on seeing the patient as a human being. ~ Terry Jones, #NFDB
1044:Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. ~ Hanya Yanagihara, #NFDB
1045:Sherlock Holmes—his limits. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil. Philosophy.—Nil. Astronomy.—Nil. Politics.—Feeble. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them. Chemistry.—Profound. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. Plays the violin well. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1046:At four, I woke but thought I was still dreaming. Holmes was perched at the end of my bed. Actually, she was perched on top of my feet, effectively pinning me in place.It might have been sexy, except she was wearing a giant T-shirt that read CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS, so it was insane, and her face looked like she'd been crying, so it was terrifying.
Completely unbidden, my father's list of rules for dealing with Holmeses began scrolling through my head. #28: If you're upset, Holmes is the last person you should ask to make you feel better, unless you want to be chided for having feelings. #29: If Holmes is upset, hide all firearms and install a new lock on your door. I swore and scrabbled to push myself up on my elbows. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
1047:Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous scientific formation; a formation half chimerical and half positive, itself founded on the treasure slowly amassed by the practical discoveries of metallurgy, medicine, industry, and domestic economy. It has to do with alchemy, which pretended to enrich its adepts by teaching them to manufacture gold and silver, to shield them from diseases by the preparation of the panacea, and finally to obtain for them perfect felicity by identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit. ~ Marcellin Berthelot Les Origines de l'Alkimie (1885) as quoted by M. M. Pattison Muir, A History of Chemical Theories and Laws (1907) Ch.1, p. 2., #NFDB
1048:Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth’s hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries. ~ James E Lovelock, #NFDB
1049:I became a vegan the day I watched a video of a calf being born on a factory farm. The baby was dragged away from his mother before he hit the ground. The helpless calf strained its head backwards to find his mother. The mother bolted after her son and exploded into a rage when the rancher slammed the gate on her. She wailed the saddest noise I’d ever heard an animal make, and then thrashed and dug into the ground, burying her face in the muddy placenta. I had no idea what was happening respecting brain chemistry, animal instinct, or whatever. I just knew that this was deeply wrong. I just knew that such suffering could never be worth the taste of milk and veal. I empathized with the cow and the calf and, in so doing, my life changed. ~ James McWilliams, #NFDB
1050:I hope that in due time the chemists will justify their proceedings by some large generalisations deduced from the infinity of results which they have collected. For me I am left hopelessly behind and I will acknowledge to you that through my bad memory organic chemistry is to me a sealed book. Some of those here, Hofmann for instance, consider all this however as scaffolding, which will disappear when the structure is built. I hope the structure will be worthy of the labour. I should expect a better and a quicker result from the study of the powers of matter, but then I have a predilection that way and am probably prejudiced in judgment. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
1051:For instance, in the eighteenth century, a brilliant young student from the University of Ingolstadt caught the eye of members of the Broederschap. His work with galvanism and chemistry was deemed to have tremendous potential, and they recruited him. He was given a thorough grounding in the core principles of the brotherhood’s techniques, but he chafed at their restrictions and eventually went rogue, disappearing to pursue his own research. Agents scoured the known world for him, but it was years before five Chimerae were dispatched to the Arctic, where he had constructed and animated a monstrous being using cadavers and lightning. Four of the five troops were killed, but the rogue doctor and his creation also died out there on the ice. ~ Daniel O Malley, #NFDB
1052:Miss Ellis?" Mrs. Perterson says. "It's your turn. Introduce Alex to the class"
"This is Alejandro Fuentes. When he wasn't hanging out on street corners and harrassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what i mean. His secret desire is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you Mrs. Peterson."
Brittney flashed me a triumpnet smile, thinking she won this round. Guess again, gringa. "This is Brittney Ellis," I say, all eyes focused on me. "This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes to extend her wardrobe, and spent her daddy's money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets. Her secret desire is to date a Mexicano before she graduates."
Game on... ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1053:7 ALL ELECTRIC J. B. STRAUBEL HAS A TWO-INCH-LONG SCAR that cuts across the middle of his left cheek. He earned it in high school, during a chemistry class experiment. Straubel whipped up the wrong concoction of chemicals, and the beaker he was holding exploded, throwing off shards of glass, one of which sliced through his face. The wound lingers as a tinkerer’s badge of honor. It arrived near the end of a childhood full of experimentation with chemicals and machines. Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry lab in the basement of his family’s home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or pilfered. At thirteen, Straubel found an old golf cart at the dump. He brought it back home and restored it to working ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
1054:Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so? ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1055:a basic unit of measure in chemistry, which was named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its value is placed at 6.0221367 × 1023, which is an enormously large number. Chemistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific Ocean, or soft drink cans that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to a depth of 200 miles. An equivalent number of American pennies would be enough to make every person on Earth a dollar trillionaire. It is a big number. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1056:First, using images made from the oldest components of the organism’s interior—the processes of metabolic chemistry largely carried out in viscera and in the blood circulation and the movements they generated—nature gradually fashioned feelings. Second, using images from a less ancient component of the interior—the skeletal frame and the muscles attached to it—nature generated a representation of the encasement of each life, a literal representation of the house inhabited by each life. The eventual combination of these two sets of representations opened the way for consciousness. Third, using the same image-making devices and an inherent power of images—the power to stand for and symbolize something else—nature developed verbal languages. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1057:Different types of cells (brain cells, muscle cells, etc.) differ from each other in the structure and chemistry of their cell-bodies. The differences are due to the interaction between gene-complex cell-body and the cell's environment. In each growing and differentiating tissue a different portion of the total gene-complex is active-only that branch of the gene-hierarchy which is concerned with the functions assigned to the tissue in question; the remainder of teh genes is 'switched off'. And if we inquire into the nature of the agency which switches genes on and off, we find once more the familiar devices of triggers and feedbacks. The 'triggers' are the chemical 'inducers', 'organisers', 'operators' and 'repressors', etc. already mentioned. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1058:Witness
Against the enormous rocks of a rough coast
The ocean rams itself in pitched assault
And spastic rage to which there is no halt;
Foam-white brigades collapse; but the huge host
Has infinite reserves; at each attack
The impassive cliffs look down in gray disdain
At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain,
Figured in froth, aquamarine and black.
Something in the blood-chemistry of life,
Unspeakable, impressive, undeterred,
Expresses itself without needing a word
In this sea-crazed Empedoclean Strife.
It is a scene of unmatched melancholy,
Weather of misery, cloud cover of distress,
To which there are not witnesses, unless
One counts the briny, tough and thorned sea holly.
~ Anthony Evan Hecht,#NFDB
1059:The girl you think is the perfect girl for you is never the perfect girl for you. One of these days, a girl is going to come along, and you won’t even see her comin.’ And she’ll rock your world.” Fisher said this like it was a done deal. “Oh yeah?” Finn already wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t. He would stick around until Fish was ready to go. And who knew when that would be. “Yeah! And I guarantee she won’t be your type. And you’re going to strategize, and think, and make lists. And it’s not gonna add up.” “That’s not your own theory, Fish. It’s chemistry. Opposites attract.” “Yeah. But it’s more than that. You can have opposites that don’t attract. It has to be just the right kind of opposite. And you won’t know what you’ve got . . .” “Til it’s gone? ~ Amy Harmon, #NFDB
1060:I was sure that if I could just scale this fortress I would reach a height with a sunny blue sky and fresh air. I would stand there and experience myself as redeemable rather than ruined. I had no idea what kind of animal I was facing.
If you had suggested to me at the time that my problems were due to some faulty wiring, some chemistry experiment gone wrong in my brain, I'd have said you were suggesting that I not take responsibility for my own choices. Now I know I was wrong. Now when I'm haunted by the specter of depression, I recognize it for what it is. I don't systematically dismantle my life every time depression pops out from behind a tree. But at that time, I was sure it was fixable if the world would just change faster, or if I would. ~ Jillian Lauren,#NFDB
1061:My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book, and said, "Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash."
If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discoveries ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,#NFDB
1062:For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1063:In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I felt only anger. We were the ones who’d paid for it, I thought. Mother. Luke. Shawn. We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
1064:Or on retiring to Prunesquallors' he might take down one of the Doctor's many books and read, for these days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from. He imagined himself occasions when the conversation of one from who he foresaw advancement might turn to astronomy, metaphysics, history, chemistry, or literature, and he realized that to be able to drop into the argument a lucid and exact thought, an opinion based on what might *appear* to be a life-time study, would instantaneously gain more for him than waiting until the conversation turned upon what lay within his scope of experience. ~ Mervyn Peake, #NFDB
1065:This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
1066:Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3(i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
1067:Here I should issue a caveat. In origins-of-life research (and probably in most other disciplines as well), scientists gravitate to models that highlight their personal scientific specialty. Organic chemist Stanley Miller and his cohorts saw life’s origins as essentially a problem in organic chemistry. Geochemists, by contrast, have tended to focus on more intricate origins scenarios involving such variables as temperature and pressure and chemically complex rocks. Experts in membrane-forming lipid molecules promote the “lipid world,” while molecular biologists who study DNA and RNA view the “RNA world” as the model to beat. Specialists who study viruses, or metabolism, or clays, or the deep biosphere have their idiosyncratic prejudices as well. We all do it; we all focus ~ Robert M Hazen, #NFDB
1068:(The string is extremely tiny, at the Planck length of 10 ^-33 cm, a billion billion times smaller than a proton, so all subatomic particles appear pointlike.)
If we were to pluck this string, the vibration would change; the electron might turn into a neutrino. Pluck it again and it might turn into a quark. In fact, if you plucked it hard enough, it could turn into any of the known subatomic particles.
Strings can interact by splitting and rejoining, thus creating the interactions we see among electrons and protons in atoms. In this way, through string theory, we can reproduce all the laws of atomic and nuclear physics. The "melodies" that can be written on strings correspond to the laws of chemistry. The universe can now be viewed as a vast symphony of strings. ~ Michio Kaku,#NFDB
1069:You're supposed to be a spirit of intellect. I don't understand why you're obsessed with sex."
Bob's voice got defensive. "It's an academic interest, Harry."
"Oh yeah? Well maybe I don't think it's fair to let your academia go peeping in other people's houses."
"Wait a minute. My academia doesn't just peep -"
I held up a hand. "Save it. I don't want to hear it."
He grunted. "You're trivializing what getting out for a bit means to me, Harry. You're insulting my masculinity."
"Bob," I said, "you're a skull . You don't have any masculinity to insult."
"Oh yeah?" Bob challenged me. "Pot kettle black, Harry! Have you gotten a date yet? Huh? Most men have something better to do in the middle of the night than play with their chemistry sets. ~ Jim Butcher,#NFDB
1070:It is the form of hemoglobin, then, that permits its function. The physical structure of the molecule enables its chemical nature, the chemical nature enables its physiological function, and its physiology ultimately permits is biological activity. The complex workings of living beings can be perceived in terms of these layers: physics enabling chemistry, and chemistry enabling physiology. To Schrodinger's "What is life?" a biochemist might answer, "If not chemicals." And what are chemicals- a biophysicist might add-if not molecules of matter?
This description of physiology-as the exquisite matching of form and function, down to the molecular level-dates back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, living organisms were nothing more than exquisite assemblages of machines. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,#NFDB
1071:The commerce seemed to be one-way; nothing was being produced in Ameristan that was desired outside of it. Zula, Sophia’s mother, had spoken once about the way that Midwestern farmers had slowly, over generations, beggared themselves by producing commodities. She and Jake had gone in together on a few business ventures intended to create distinct local brands that, like the various cheeses of France, might fetch higher prices in coastal grocery stores: producing pancetta instead of bacon, and so on. But chemistry was chemistry. Ethanol was ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup was high-fructose corn syrup, and so on. So economic competition here was a war of all against all, and the only winners were people in cities who wanted to buy that stuff for as little money as possible. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1072:The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception – and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
1073:Well, take the equation of quantum mechanics that determines the form of the orbitals of an electron. This equation has a certain number of solutions, and these solutions correspond exactly to: hydrogen, helium, oxygen...and the other elements! Mendeleev's periodic table is structured exactly like the set of these solutions. The properties of the elements, with everything else, follows from the solution of this equation. Quantum mechanics deciphers perfectly the secret of the structure of the periodic table of elements.
Pythagoras and Plato's ancient dream is realized: to describe all of the world's substances with a single formula. The infinite complexity of chemistry, captured by the solutions of a single equation! And this is just one of the applications of quantum mechanics. ~ Carlo Rovelli,#NFDB
1074:Adiyogi’s yogic mastery allowed him the pleasure of being internally drunk and completely aware, fully stoned and fully conscious, at every moment of his life. This, he reminds us, is possible for each one of us. We can generate our own peace and joy internally, without any external stimulus. The path of yoga makes us the masters of our own chemistry, the authors of our own bliss. Once we find access to our own inner intoxication without losing our stability, our lives become an exuberant expression of our joy, rather than a pursuit of happiness. Intoxicated and alert; dynamic and still; superbly formed and yet in tune with lunar mysteries where things lose all shape and definition; larger-than-life and yet covered with the ash of death – Adiyogi embodied many contradictions all at once. When ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1075:The authors determined the completeness of a mystical experience using two questionnaires, including the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which is based in part on William James’s writing in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” The questionnaire measures feelings of unity, sacredness, ineffability, peace and joy, as well as the impression of having transcended space and time and the “noetic sense” that the experience has disclosed some objective truth about reality. A “complete” mystical experience is one that exhibits all six characteristics. Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion such a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1076:What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1077:Liz Gorman, a fiery redhead, had been one of the founding members of the Raven Brigade. During their first “mission”—a failed attempt to burn down a university chemistry lab—the police had picked up a code name on the scanner: CD. It was later revealed that the male members of the Brigade called her CD, short for Carpenter’s Dream, because she was “flat as a board and easy to screw.” Sixties radicals, for all their so-called progressive thoughts, were some of the world’s biggest sexists. Now the implants made sense. Everyone Myron had interviewed remembered one thing about “Carla”—her cup size. Liz Gorman had been famous for her flat chest—what better disguise than oversized breast implants? “The feds and cops are cooperating on this one,” Higgins said. “They’re trying to keep this quiet for a while. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1078:What do you study?"
"As much as we know of the different sciences. We have, within our limits, a good deal of knowledge of anatomy, physiology, nutrition—all that pertains to a full and beautiful personal life. We have our botany and chemistry, and so on—very rudimentary, but interesting; our own history, with its accumulating psychology."
"You put psychology with history—not with personal life?"
"Of course. It is ours; it is among and between us, and it changes with the succeeding and improving generations. We are at work, slowly and carefully, developing our whole people along these lines. It is glorious work—splendid! To see the thousands of babies improving, showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacities—don't you find it so in your country? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman,#NFDB
1079:An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct" the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry - including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology-all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
1080:An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
1081:Alpha can refer to the first of something," said Kai, "or the beginning of everything. It can be attributed to a particularly powerful or charismatic person, or it can signify the dominant leader in a pack of animals, most notably, of course, wolves." His serious expression tweaked briefly into a teasing smile. "It has meanings in chemistry, physics, and even astronomy, where it describes the brightest star in a constellation. But it seems clear that Ze'ev and Scarlet have created their own definition for the word, and their relationship has given this word a new meaning for all of us. Being an Alpha means that you'll stand against all adversity to be with your mate. It means accepting each other, both of your strengths and your flaws. It means forging your own path to happiness and to love. ~ Marissa Meyer, #NFDB
1082:Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1083:It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking. ~ Terri Cheney, #NFDB
1084:Only three of the naturally occurring elements were manufactured in the big bang. The rest were forged in the high-temperature hearts and explosive remains of dying stars, enabling subsequent generations of star systems to incorporate this enrichment, forming planets and, in our case, people.
For many, the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is a forgotten oddity—a chart of boxes filled with mysterious, cryptic letters last encountered on the wall of high school chemistry class. As the organizing principle for the chemical behavior of all known and yet-to-be-discovered elements in the universe, the table instead ought to be a cultural icon, a testimony to the enterprise of science as an international human adventure conducted in laboratories, particle accelerators, and on the frontier of the cosmos itself. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
1085:The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
1086:But this story isn’t about Toby’s twelfth birthday, or the car wreck at Jonas’s party—not really. There is a type of problem in organic chemistry called a retrosynthesis. You are presented with a compound that does not occur in nature, and your job is to work backward, step by step, and ascertain how it came to exist—what sort of conditions led to its eventual creation. When you are finished, if done correctly, the equation can be read normally, making it impossible to distinguish the question from the answer. I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
1087:Yet among the multiple animal inventions at the dawn of the Cambrian were new forms of mobility. A number of critters began burrowing into these mats and braving the toxic soils beneath them. These digging, tunneling creatures are known as “bioturbators,” basically life that stirs up the ground. In fact, the fossils that officially define the beginning of the Cambrian in the geological record, Trichophycus pedum, are identified by the looping, burrowing patterns they left in the seafloor. Once this bioturbating disturbance of the Cambrian seafloor got started, it began changing the texture and chemistry of the dirt in ways that made it more inviting for other burrowing creatures. Oxygen began penetrating the loosened soil beneath the mats, neutralizing the lethal hydrogen sulfide. This started a positive feedback. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
1088:I’m smart, right? I should be able to come up with a solid plan as to how I can get back to the twenty-first century.
The trouble is I’m lost without Wikipedia and Google. I know all sorts of things, of course, but none of it is useful: the periodic table of elements, how to factor a math equation with four different variables, the symbiotic relationship between the great white shark and the remora fish. Completely useless, random information.
Even a year of advanced chemistry isn’t going to do me any good; it’s not like there’s a chapter in there about time travel.
I get up off the bed and creep to the door and peek out. No one is around.
I’ll just explore the house. Maybe there really is a phone hidden somewhere that will prove Emily is lying about 1815. Or maybe I’ll find a servant in some Old Navy jeans. ~ Mandy Hubbard,#NFDB
1089:Ah!' said Michel, tempted, 'you have modern poems?'
'Of course. For instance, Martillac's 'Electric Harmonies,' which won a prize last year from the Academic of Sciences, and Monsieur de Pulfasse's 'Meditations on Oxygen;' and we have the 'Poetic Parallelogram,' and even the 'Decarbonated Odes. . .'
Michel couldn't bear hearing another word and found himself outside again, stupefied and overcome. Not even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age! Science, Chemistry, Mechanics had invaded the realm of poetry! 'And such things are read,' he murmured as he hurried through the streets, ' perhaps even bought! And signed by the authors and placed on the shelves marked 'Literature.' But not one copy of Balzac, not one work by Victor Hugo! Where can I find such things-where, if not the Library... ~ Jules Verne,#NFDB
1090:School was out for the day, it was just barely starting to feel like spring, and everybody streamed through the hallways drunk on 3:15-p.m. freedom, leaving the rush of students headed for the main doors only long enough to pause at their lockers before rejoining it, like all of it was choreographed, every moment rehearsed, every sound and sight a special effect--the slam and rattle of the metal locker doors, the "call me laters" and "fuckin' chemistry tests" loud and throaty, the thick smell of just-lit cigarettes as soon as you hit the outside steps, the sound of mix tapes blaring from cars as they tore away from the student parking lot, windows down on both sides. I usually liked to soak in all of that for a minute or two, just linger at my locker before heading off to change for practice. But that day there was Coley. ~ Emily M Danforth, #NFDB
1091:was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1092:In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1093:Indications of spermatic firepower are evident in the differences between a man’s first spurts and his last. A human ejaculation typically consists of anywhere from three to nine spurts. Researchers who somehow managed to capture “split ejaculates” for analysis found that the first spurts contain chemicals that protect against various kinds of chemical attack. What sort of chemical attack? Aside from leucocytes and antigens present in a woman’s reproductive tract (more on that later), they protect the sperm from the chemicals in the latter spurts of other men’s ejaculate. These final spurts contain a spermicidal substance that slows the advance of any latecomers. In other words, competing sperm from other men seems to be anticipated in the chemistry of men’s semen, both in the early spurts (protective) and in the later spurts (attacking). ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
1094:Every day since TUB (The Ultimate Betrayal) had been a disaster. He had English with Anika, who never failed to shoot him a forced smile. Then chemistry with Mason, where they were lab partners. Gael refused to talk to either of them. In the past week, he’d barely exchanged words with anyone.
Things were even awkward with Danny. Even though he was Gael’s best friend besides Mason, the dude was gaga for Jenna, and Jenna had long been Anika’s BFF. As such, this had become the unspoken rule among them: Jenna was Team Anika, Danny was Team Jenna, and by the transitive property, Danny couldn’t be on Gael’s side.
Gael hadn’t ever thought to make friends outside of their little group. He hadn’t hedged his bets, if you will.
He’d put all his eggs in one basket.
And those eggs had decided to hook up with each other behind his back. ~ Leah Konen,#NFDB
1095:Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that have been touted as possible settings for the origin of life: warm ponds (sadly Darwin was wrong on that), primordial soup, microporous pumice stones, beaches, panspermia, you name it. But it does not rule out hydrothermal vents; on the contrary, it rules them in. Hydrothermal vents are exactly the kind of dissipative structures that we seek – continuous flow, far-from-equilibrium electrochemical reactors. Hydrothermal ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
1096:The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise… ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1097:Stanley Woodworth, my high school French teacher, once described the peculiar passion for his own vocation in the following terms: “The joy of teaching lies not in one’s own enthusiasm for the students, or even for the subject matter, but rather for the privilege of introducing the one to the other.” If this is true of French, chemistry, or history, how much more is it true of the pastor’s passion, which is not simply love of God or love of people, but rather the love of introducing the one (people) to the other (God)? The pastor’s special charge is to care for the people of God by speaking and showing and by being and doing God’s truth and love. Success in ministry is determined not by numbers (e.g., people, programs, dollars) but by the increase of people’s knowledge and love of God. This is the only way “to present everyone mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28). ~ Kevin J Vanhoozer, #NFDB
1098:Such was my understanding of the history of art – its ‘narrative’, I ought to call it – until I met my wife. It is barely more sophisticated now, though I’ve picked up a few things along the way, enough to get by, so that my art appreciation is almost on a par with my French. In the early days of our relationship Connie was quite evangelical and bought me several books, second-hand editions because we were in our happy-but-poor phase. Gombrich’s The Story of Art was one, The Shock of the New another, given specifically to stop me tutting at modern art. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it, and they’re terrific books, both of them, though I’ve retained almost nothing of their contents. Perhaps I should have given Connie a basic primer in organic chemistry in return, but she never expressed an interest. ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB
1099:If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1100:Venus is very much like Earth in size and composition, but its surface temperature is about 460° C (860 F), hotter than your oven when it’s set to “broil.” The difference between the temperatures of Earth and Venus is not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. No, Venus is hot primarily because its atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that keeps the Sun’s heat trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Venus is the extreme case of climate change: There is no way life, as we know it, could survive at those beyond-broiling temperatures. It would take a big change in Earth’s geology and chemistry for it to become exactly like Venus. But humans are pouring carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere right now at an alarming rate, shoving our climate in that high-carbon direction, which is a terrifying prospect. We do not want to become even a little like Venus. We ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
1101:To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming 'depressed' in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being 'reamed out' by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
1102:Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1103:On the exoteric side if necessary the mind should be trained by the study of any well-developed science, such as chemistry, or mathematics. The idea of organization is the first step, that of interpretation the second. The Master of the Temple, whose grade corresponds to Binah, is sworn to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul. {85} But even the beginner may attempt this practice with advantage. Either a fact fits in or it does not; if it does not, harmony is broken; and as the Universal harmony cannot be broken, the discord must be in the mind of the student, thus showing that he is not in tune with that Universal choir. Let him then puzzle out first the great facts, then the little; until one summer, when he is bald and lethargic after lunch, he understands and appreciates the existence of flies!
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Part II, The Cup, #index,#NFDB
1104:Oxytocin is an amino acid peptide. A hormone. They call it the love chemical. “So?” Kelsey gave him a dead-eyed stare. “So when you’re further along in your pregnancy, more oxytocin receptors will be created in your uterine muscles. When the baby’s big enough, your oxytocin level will rise, triggering labor, and will help your muscles contract so you can give birth.” “Gross,” said Cory. “No,” Jack said. “Miraculous. Without the oxytocin, your muscles wouldn’t be strong enough to push that baby out. But because of that chemical, you are. You’ll be superhero strong.” He smiled right into Kelsey’s eyes. “Then, when you see your baby, that rush of oxytocin will help you bond. That’s why they call it the love drug. And if you breast-feed, more oxytocin gets released, strengthening that bond. The maternal instinct is the strongest instinct in the world. Chemistry is definitely part of that. ~ Kristan Higgins, #NFDB
1105:A few times, all the world’s land surface has clumped together into one giant supercontinent, surrounded by one global ocean. Even supercontinents drift, and 450 million years ago the planet was put out of sorts when the supercontinent Gondwana drifted down over the South Pole. As this one and only huge continent completely froze over, the ice and snow piled up, miles thick. So much of the world’s water became locked into these colossal drifts that sea level plummeted. During several million years in this strange configuration, there were multiple glaciations punctuated with more mild interglacials. Both sea level and ocean chemistry fluctuated sharply, dooming many species dependent upon the disappearing and changing coastal environments. This caused the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, probably the second-most extreme mass extinction in Earth history. It seems that the perpetrator was just a “series ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
1106:Wylan cleared his throat. “The chemistry is complicated. I was hoping Kuwei would help.”
Nina said something to Kuwei in Shu. He shrugged and looked away, lip jutting out slightly. Whether it was the recent death of his father or the fact that he’d found himself stuck in a cemetery with a band of thieves, the boy had become increasingly sullen.
“Well?” Jesper prodded.
“I have other interests,” Kuwei replied.
Kaz’s black gaze pinned Kuwei like the tip of a dagger. “I suggest rethinking your priorities.”
Jesper gave Kuwei another nudge. “That’s Kaz’s way of saying, ‘Help Wylan or I’ll seal you up in one of these tombs and see how that suits your interests.’ ”
Matthias was no longer sure what the Shu boy understood or didn’t, but apparently he’d received the message. Kuwei swallowed and nodded grudgingly.
“The power of negotiation,” Jesper said, and shoved a cracker in his mouth. ~ Leigh Bardugo,#NFDB
1107:Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.” The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes, which may not be far enough. No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There’s strong evidence for ocean acidification during an extinction event known as the Toarcian Turnover, which occurred 183 million years ago, in the early Jurassic, and similar evidence at the end of the Paleocene, 55 million years ago, when several forms of marine life suffered a major crisis. “Oh, ocean acidification,” Zalasiewicz had told me at Dob’s Linn. “That’s the big nasty one that’s coming down. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
1108:Her muscles clearly were not just for show. She pulled him into an empty chemistry classroom and closed the door. There were workstations and beakers and sinks with high faucets. A giant chart of the periodic table of elements, both a staple of every science classroom and a cliché, dominated the far wall. “Where is she?” Kristin asked. Adam wasn’t sure how to play it, so he went with honesty. “I don’t know.” “How can you not know?” “We were supposed to meet for dinner last night. She never showed.” “She just didn’t . . . ?” Kristin shook her head in confusion. “Did you call the police?” “What? No.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. She sent a text. She said she needed some time away.” “From what?” Adam just looked at her. Kristin said, “You?” “Seems so.” “Oh. Sorry.” Kristin stepped back, chastened. “So why are you here?” “Because I want to make sure she’s okay. I figured she’d be at work. She never calls in sick.” “Never, ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1109:Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it is more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthromorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
1110:THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE
Before you examine the body of a patient,
Be patient to learn his story.
For once you learn his story,
You will also come to know
His body.
Before you diagnose any sickness,
Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart.
For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun,
Can point to the sickness in
Any one of his other parts.
Before you treat a man with a condition,
Know that not all cures can heal all people.
For the chemistry that works on one patient,
May not work for the next,
Because even medicine has its own
Conditions.
Before asserting a prognosis on any patient,
Always be objective and never subjective.
For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life,
But then later discovering that he will lose,
Will harm him more than by telling him
That he may lose,
But then he wins.
THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
1111:Thinking About Ecstasy "
Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wnats to know delight as the native land he is. ~ Jack Gilbert,#NFDB
1112:Zombie!” Sammy calls. “I knew it was you.”
Zombie?
“Where are you taking him?” Ben says to me in a deep voice. I don’t remember it being that deep. Is my memory bad or is he lowering it on purpose, to sound older?
“Zombie, that’s Cassie,” Sam chides him. “You know—Cassie.”
“Cassie?” Like he’s never heard the name before.
“Zombie?” I say, because I really haven’t heard that name before.
I pull off the cap, thinking it might help him recognize me, then immediately regret it. I know what my hair must look like.
“We go to the same high school,” I say, drawing my fingers hastily through my chopped-off locks. “I sit in front of you in Honors Chemistry.”
Ben shakes his head like he’s clearing out the cobwebs.
Sammy goes, “I told you she was coming.”
“Quiet, Sam,” I scold him.
“Sam?” Ben asks.
“My name is Nugget now, Cassie,” Sam informs me.
“Well, sure it is.” I turn to Ben. “You know my brother. ~ Rick Yancey,#NFDB
1113:Some form of natural teleology, a type of explanation whose intelligibility I briefly defended in the last chapter, would be an alternative to a miracle— either in the sense of a wildly improbable fluke or in the sense of a divine intervention in the natural order. The tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry. This seems like an admissible conjecture given the available evidence. And once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture , resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
1114:Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1115:Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we've endured as a result of society's loathing, unharmed. Whatever of theses wounds I didn't experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not ins some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex. ~ Michelle Tea, #NFDB
1116:Alchemy is neither a premature chemistry nor a psychology in the modem sense, although both of these are to be found in alchemical writings . Alchemy is a symbolic science of natural forms based on the correspondence between different planes of reality and making use of mineral and metal symbolism to expound a spiritual science of the souh For alchemy, nature is sacred, and the alchemist is the guardian of nature considered as a theophany and reflection of spiritual realities . A purely profane chemistry could come into being only when the substances of alchemy became completely emptied of their sacred quality. For this very reason, a re-discovery of the alchemical view of nature, without in any way denying the chemical sciences which deal with substances from another point of view, could reinstate the spiritual and symbolic character of the forms, colours and processes that man encounters throughout his life in the corporeal world. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
1117:And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of all the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1118:I don’t remember well, and in fact I know nothing absolutely nothing at all, about the women I have loved.'
Papan answered: That simply means that you have never loved. You simply have no idea of love as an absolute concept. Loving is knowing. It is also like a crime since it involves death, burial, and resurrection. Love is something very serious. Today it is completely forgotten.
Love in fact is a strange and secret chemistry, in which the androgynous is born. This is true and complete love; everything else is different. Have you ever noticed how impossible it was to fuse yourself with the person you thought you loved, even though sleeping in the same bed? There is always something separating you, a thread of air, a different dream. Can the lovers be truly united if each one dreams a different dream? If you ever begin to dream the same dreams as your love, then you will be able to create the new star, the star of Him-Her, El-Ella. ~ Miguel Serrano,#NFDB
1119:Kauffman was in awe when he realized all this. Here it was again: order. Order for free. Order arising naturally from the laws of physics and chemistry. Order emerging spontaneously from molecular chaos and manifesting itself as a system that grows. The idea was indescribably beautiful.
But was it life? Well no, Kauffman had to admit, not if you meant life as we know it today. An autocatalytic set would have had no DNA, no genetic code, no cell membrane. In fact, it would have had no real independent existence except as a haze of molecules floating around in some ancient pond. If an extraterrestrial Darwin had happened by at the time, he (or it) would have been hard put to notice anything unusual. Any given molecule participating in the autocatalytic set would have looked pretty much like any other molecule. The essence was not to be found in any individual piece of the set, but in the overall dynamics of the set: its collective behavior. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,#NFDB
1120:The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things,—marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1121:Where’s my cell phone?” I ask. “And please put a shirt on.”
He reaches down and grabs my phone off the floor. “Why?”
“The reason I need my cell,” I say as I take it from him, “is to call a cab and the reason I want you to put a shirt on is, well, because, um…”
“You’ve never seen a guy with his shirt off?”
“Ha, ha. Very funny. Believe me, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”
“Wanna bet?” he says, then moves his hands to the button on his jeans and pops it open.
Isabel walks in at that exact moment. “Whoa, Alex. Please keep your pants on.”
When she looks over at me I put my hands up. “Don’t look at me. I was just about to call a cab when he--”
Shaking her head while Alex buttons back up, she walks to her purse and picks up a set of keys. “Forget the cab. I’ll drive you home.”
“I’ll drive her,” Alex cuts in.
Isabel seems exhausted dealing with us, similar to how Mrs. Peterson looks during chemistry class. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1122:Before you examine the body of a patient,
Be patient to learn his story.
For once you learn his story,
You will also come to know
His body.
Before you diagnose any sickness,
Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart.
For the emotions in a man's moon or sun,
Can point to the sickness in
Any one of his other parts.
Before you treat a man with a condition,
Know that not all cures can heal all people.
For the chemistry that works on one patient,
May not work for the next,
Because even medicine has its own
Conditions.
Before asserting a prognosis on any patient,
Always be objective and never subjective.
For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life,
But then later discovering that he will lose,
Will harm him more than by telling him
That he may lose,
But then he wins.
THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE by Suzy Kassem
Copyright 1993-1994 - THE SPRING FOR WISDOM ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
1123:Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses:
"1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.
2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.
3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.
4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.
5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.
8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
1124:This was the first study ever to show that cognitive-behavior therapy—or, indeed, any psychiatric treatment that did not rely on drugs—has the power to change faulty brain chemistry in a well-identified brain circuit. What’s more, the therapy had been self-directed, something that was and to a great extent remains anathema to psychology and psychiatry. The changes we detected on PET scans were the kind that neuropsychiatrists might see in patients being treated with powerful mind-altering drugs. We had demonstrated such changes in patients who had, not to put too fine a point on it, changed the way they thought about their thoughts. Self-directed therapy had dramatically and significantly altered brain function. There are now a wealth of brain imaging data supporting the notion that the sort of willful cognitive shift achieved during Refocusing through mindful awareness brings about important changes in brain circuitry as we will see in later chapters. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1125:you're Shane, right?'
He inched away from her and managed a quick nod as he twisted the rag he held in his fingers.
'Heidi sad you were willing to teach me how to ride.' Her expression shifted from entertained to confused, as if she was wondering why no one had mentioned he was a can or two shy of a six-pack.
'A horse,' he clarified, then wanted to kick himself. What else but a horse? Did he think she was here to learn to ride his mother's elephant?
One corner of Annabelle's perfect, full mouth twitched. 'A horse would be good. You seem to have several.'
He wanted to remind himself that he was usually fine around women. Smooth even. He was intelligent, funny and could, on occasion, be charming. Just not now, with his blood pumping and his brain doing nothing more than shouting "it's her, it's her" over and over again.
Chemistry, he thought grimly. It could turn the smartest man into a drooling idiot. Here he was, proving the theory true. ~ Susan Mallery,#NFDB
1126:SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits. 1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil. 2. Philosophy.—Nil. 3. Astronomy.—Nil. 4. Politics.—Feeble. 5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. 6. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their color and consistence in what part of London he had received them. 7. Chemistry.—Profound. 8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic. 9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. 10. Plays the violin well. 11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. 12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1127:think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps, ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
1128:Focus on the positive
Here’s the key: Just because a thought comes doesn’t mean you have to dwell on it. You control the doorway to your mind. If the thought is negative, discouraging, and pushing you down, then dismiss it. Don’t dwell on it. Keep the door closed. Choose to dwell on thoughts that empower you, inspire you, and encourage you to have faith, hope, and joy.
If you keep your mind filled with the right thoughts, there won’t be any room for the wrong thoughts. All through the day you should be focused on the positive: “Something good is going to happen to me. I’m strong, healthy, talented, disciplined. I’m fun to be around. My children will be mighty in the land. I can do all things through Christ. I will pass this chemistry test. I will meet the right person. I will overcome this challenge. My best days are still out in front of me.”
When your mind is filled with thoughts of faith, hope, and victory, you will draw in the good things of God. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
1129:In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
1130:He opens one bottle and holds it out to me. ‘Drink this one.’
Inside is a milky blue liquid with what looks like thin slivers of glass floating in it. Surely he doesn’t mean for me to drink glass. ‘Am I going to regret consuming its contents?’
‘No. But I imagine you’ll still call me every expletive you can possibly think of.’ He presses it into my palm.
‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ I sniff the vial and scrunch up my nose at a sharp tang that burns my nostrils. Like something that might come out of my chemistry set. ‘Ugh! What’s in this? It smells vile.’
‘I knew a human girl once. She was stubborn, like you. Refused to drink the paltry contents of that bottle, like you . . .’ He pauses for dramatic effect. ‘And she died a horrible, painful death – torturous, really – because she wouldn’t take my advice.’
I scrutinise him. ‘There was no girl who died, was there?’
‘There will be if you don’t drink what’s in that damned bottle. ~ Elizabeth May,#NFDB
1131:In preparing for this ceremony," Kai said, setting the bouquet on the mantel behind him, "I did some research and learned that the word Alpha has held many meanings across history. Alpha can refer to the first of something," said Kai, "or the beginning of everything. It can be attributed to a particularly powerful or charismatic person, or it can signify the dominant leader in a pack of animals, most notably, of course, wolves." His serious expression tweaked briefly into a teasing smile. "It has meanings in chemistry, physics, and even astronomy, where it describes the brightest star in a constellation. But it seems clear that Ze’ev and Scarlet have created their own definition for the word, and their relationship has given this word a new meaning for all of us. Being an Alpha means that you’ll stand against all adversity to be with your mate. It means accepting each other, both for your strengths and your flaws. It means forging your own path to happiness and to love. ~ Marissa Meyer, #NFDB
1132:This principle - that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend - is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman 'lets herself go' or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1133:To sum up: the respective inadequacies of materialism and theism as transcendent conceptions, and the impossibility of abandoning the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe, lead to the hope for an expanded but still naturalistic understanding that avoids psychophysical reductionism. The essential character of such an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects of the physical laws of nature nor as the result of intentional intervention in nature from without but as an unsurprising if not inevitable consequence of the order that governs the natural world from within. That order would have to include physical law, but if life is not just a physical phenomenon, the origin and evolution of life and mind will not be explainable by physics and chemistry alone. An expanded, but still unified, form of explanation will be needed, and I suspect it will have to include teleological elements. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
1134:If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1135:Practical discoveries must have been made many times without science acquiring thereby any new fact. For to prevent a discovery from being lost there must be such a combination favourable circumstances... There must be publicity... the application of the discovery must be... obvious, as satisfying some want. ...Nor is this all; for a practical discovery to become a scientific fact, it must serve to demonstrate the error of one hypothesis, and to suggest a new one, better fitted for the synthesis of existing facts. But old beliefs are proverbially obstinate and virulent in their opposition to newer and truer theories which are destined to eject and replace them. To sum up, even in our own day chemistry rests on a less sound basis than either physics, which had the advantage of originating as late as the 17th century, or astronomy, which dates from the time when the Chaldean shepherd had sufficiently provided for his daily wants to find leisure for gazing into the starry heavens. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
1136:Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair. No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like “mistake” or “error” or “weakness,” the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, compassionate or callous, faithful or disloyal. When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like “virtue,” “character,” “evil,” and “vice” altogether, that doesn’t make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language. It just means we think and talk about these choices less clearly, and thus become increasingly blind to the moral stakes of everyday life. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
1137:We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). ~ Paul R Ehrlich, #NFDB
1138:We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). ~ Paul R Ehrlich, #NFDB
1139:As in the middle ages... [t]here was then no desire to communicate discoveries; science was a sort of freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one another as they were of all other classes of society. ...[T]o form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilisation, an age which represents at once the naïveté of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic plying the loom, extracting the Tyrian dye, practising chemistry, though ignorant of its very name, and despised and oppressed, and only tolerated when he furnished Religion with her trappings or War with arms. Thus the growth of chemistry was slow, and by reason of its backwardness it was longer than any other art in ridding itself of the leading-strings of magic and astrology. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875), #NFDB
1140:The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world. ~ Brad S Gregory, #NFDB
1141:The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century-with the attendant attempt to analyze all observable phenomena in terms of mechanical chains of causation-was a knife in the heart of moral philosophy, for it reduced human beings to automatons. If all of the body and brain canbe completely described without invoking anything so empyreal as a mind, let alone a consciousness, then the notion that a person is morally responsible for his actions appears quaint, if not scientifically naive. A machine cannot be held responsible for its actions. If our minds are impotent to affect our behavior, then surely we are no more responsible for our actions than a robot is. It is an understatement to note that the triumph of materialism, as applied to questions of mind and brain, therefore makes many people squirm. For if the mysteries of the mind are reducible to physics and chemistry, then "mind is but the babbling of a robot, chained ineluctably to crude causality," as the neurobiologist Robert Doty put it in 1998. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1142:CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from
nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction- level events, platypuses,
Homo erectus, Cro- Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world. ~ Nicola Yoon,#NFDB
1143:Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1144:There are many ways to understand this. One simple way to know this is: today, if you lose your mental peace totally, you will go to a doctor. He will give you a pill. If you take this pill, your system will become peaceful. Maybe this will last just for a few hours, but you become peaceful. This pill is just a little bit of chemicals. These chemicals enter your system and make you peaceful. Or in other words, what you call peace is a certain kind of chemistry within you. Similarly, what you call joy, what you call love, what you call suffering, what you call misery, what you call fear, every human experience that you go through, has a chemical basis within you. Now the spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your own nature, when you don’t have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1145:But we didn't always egg each other on like that - more often, it was the opposite. Instead of yelling at her, I'd find myself sucked in by her hypnotic stare and unrelenting train of logical thought until I was letting her do something like pluck out my nose hair for an experiment. (To be fair, she did promise to do my chemistry homework for a month in exchange.) She taught me how to pick a basic lock, and after I'd finally maneuvered my pins into the right position and heard the telltale click and fallen back against the love seat in relief, she pulled a blindfold over my eyes and made me do it again. Later, after Holmes said she hadn't been allowed any when she was little, I bought a full-to-bursting bag of bulk candy from the union store and set it before her like an offering to a king. Deep in thought, she'd refused to try any of it, rolling her eyes at the very suggestion. When I returned from stepping out to take a call from my mother, I found her trying, very unsuccessfully, to bite into an everlasting gobstopper. ~ Brittany Cavallaro, #NFDB
1146:It is a mistake to confound Alchemy with Chemistry. Modern Chemistry is a science which deals merely with the external forms in which the element of matter is manifesting itself. It never produces anything new. We may mix and compound and decompose two or more chemical bodies an unlimited number of times, and cause them to appear under various different forms, but at the end we will have no augmentation of substance, nor anything more than the combinations of the substances that have been employed at the beginning. Alchemy does not mix or compound anything, it causes that which already exists in a latent state to become active and grow. Alchemy is, therefore, more comparable to botany or agriculture than to Chemistry; and, in fact, the growth of a plant, a tree, or an animal is an alchemical process going on in the alchemical laboratory of nature, and performed by the great Alchemist, the power of God acting in nature. ~ Franz Hartmann, in In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom, containing the History of the True and the False Rosicrucians (1890), p. 129, #NFDB
1147:But if a man finds himself in possession of great mental faculties, such as alone should venture on the solution of the hardest of all problems—those which concern nature as a whole and humanity in its widest range, he will do well to extend his view equally in all directions, without ever straying too far amid the intricacies of various by-paths, or invading regions little known; in other words, without occupying himself with special branches of knowledge, to say nothing of their petty details. There is no necessity for him to seek out subjects difficult of access, in order to escape a crowd of rivals; the common objects of life will give him material for new theories at once serious and true; and the service he renders will be appreciated by all those—and they form a great part of mankind—who know the facts of which he treats. What a vast distinction there is between students of physics, chemistry, anatomy, mineralogy, zoology, philology, history, and the men who deal with the great facts of human life, the poet and the philosopher! ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1148:The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. ~ Mark Fisher, #NFDB
1149:It's after school, after my double detentions for gym and chemistry, and I'm at Knead, about to begin working on a new piece. I wedge the clay out against my board, enjoying the therapeutic quality of each smack, prod, and punch.
As the clay oozes between my fingers and pastes against my skin, images of all sorts begin to pop into my head. I try my best to push them away,to focus instead on the cold and clammy sensation of the mound and the way it helps me relax. But after only a few short minutes of solitude, I hear someone storm their way up the back stairwell. At first I think it's Spencer, but then I hear the voice:
"I'm coming up the stairs," Adam bellows. "I'm approaching the studio area, about to pass by the sink."
I turn to look, noticing he's standing only a few feet behind me now.
"I hope I didn't startle you this time," he says.
"Ha-ha." I hold back my smile.
"I would have called your cell to tell you I was coming up, but you never gave me your number."
"I'm fine," I assure him, unable to stifle a giggle. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz,#NFDB
1150:In a long and eventful life", the Doctor said eventually, "I have experienced nothing that I could not account for by the laws of physics, chemistry or biology. If a God or Gods exist, and I cannot rule out the possibility, then I can only presume that He, She or They take no active part in the lives of the many and various creatures that populate this extensive and wonderful universe of theirs". He picked a crumb of cheese from his plate and swallowed it. "In addition, I have seen countless races worship, countless Gods with attributes which are mutually incompatible, and each race believes itself to be following the one true faith. While I respect their beliefs, I would consider it arrogance for any race to try and impose their beliefs on me, and if I had a belief of my own then it would be equally arrogant of me to impose it on them. In short, sir, I am currently an agnostic, and by the time my life draws to its close, and I have travelled from one side of the universe to the other and seen every sight there is to see, I firmly expect to be an atheist". ~ Andy Lane, #NFDB
1151:To the extent that we can identify the causes of these revolutions, they’re highly varied: glaciation in the case of the end-Ordovician extinction, global warming and changes in ocean chemistry at the end of the Permian, an asteroid impact in the final seconds of the Cretaceous. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but “one weedy species.” As Walter Alvarez put it to me, “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.” The one feature these disparate events have in common is change and, to be more specific, rate of change. When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
1152:neurosurgeon. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 with a major in chemistry and earned my M.D. at Duke University Medical School in 1980. During my eleven years of medical school and residency training at Duke as well as Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, I focused on neuroendocrinology, the study of the interactions between the nervous system and the endocrine system—the series of glands that release the hormones that direct most of your body’s activities. I also spent two of those eleven years investigating how blood vessels in one area of the brain react pathologically when there is bleeding into it from an aneurysm—a syndrome known as cerebral vasospasm. After completing a fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the United Kingdom, I spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School as an associate professor of surgery, with a specialization in neurosurgery. During those years I operated on countless patients, many of them with severe, life-threatening brain conditions. ~ Eben Alexander, #NFDB
1153:The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1154:In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because orthodox astronomy had already been broken up by Kepler and orthodox physics by Galileo; reading a new pattern into the shambles, he united them in a new conceptual frame. Similarly, chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, thus destroying its own classic concept of matter, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1155:As I close my chemistry book, out of the corner of my eye I see Alex run his hand through his hair. “Listen, I didn’t mean to be rude to you before.”
“That’s okay. I got too nosy.”
“You’re right.”
I stand, feeling uncomfortable. He grabs my arm and urges me back down.
“No,” he says, “I mean you’re right about me. I don’t place anything permanent here.”
“Why?”
“My dad,” Alex says, staring at the picture on the opposite wall. He squeezes his eyes shut. “God, there was so much blood.” He opens his eyes and captures my gaze. “If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that nobody is here forever. You have to live for the moment, each and every day…the here, the now.”
“And what do you want right now?” Right now I itch to heal his wounds and forget my own.
He touches my cheek with the tips of his fingers.
My breath hitches. “Do you want to kiss me, Alex?” I whisper.
“Dios mio, I want to kiss you…to taste your lips, your tongue.” He gently traces my lips with the tips of his fingers. “Do you want me to kiss you? Nobody else would know but the two of us. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1156:In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfill the functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who first conceived of energy conservation? Increasingly, a few of them suspect that these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions. Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the “scientific” component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labeled “error” and “superstition.” The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more that product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1157:DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
1158:Every elementary chemistry text must discuss the concept of a chemical element. Almost always, when that notion is introduced, its origin is attributed to the seventeenth-century chemist, Robert Boyle, in whose Sceptical Chymist the attentive reader will find a definition of ‘element’ quite close to that in use today. Reference to Boyle’s contribution helps to make the neophyte aware that chemistry did not begin with the sulfa drugs; in addition, it tells him that one of the scientist’s traditional tasks is to invent concepts of this sort. As a part of the pedagogic arsenal that makes a man a scientist, the attribution is immensely successful. Nevertheless, it illustrates once more the pattern of historical mistakes that misleads both students and laymen about the nature of the scientific enterprise. According to Boyle, who was quite right, his “definition” of an element was no more than a paraphrase of a traditional chemical concept; Boyle offered it only in order to argue that no such thing as a chemical element exists; as history, the textbook version of Boyle’s contribution is quite mistaken.3 ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1159:The differentiation of science into its specialties is, after all, an artificial and man-made state of affairs. While the level of knowledge was still low, the division was useful and seemed natural. It was possible for a man to study astronomy or biology without reference to chemistry or physics, or for that matter to study either chemistry or physics in isolation. With time and accumulated information, however, the borders of the specialties approached, met, and finally overlapped. The- techniques of one science became meaningful and illuminating in another.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, physical techniques made it possible to determine the chemical constitution and physical structure of stars, and the science of "astrophysics" was born. The study of the vibrations set up in the body of the earth by quakes gave rise to the study of "geophysics." 'Me study of chemical reactions through physical techniques initiated and constantly broadened the field of "physical chemistry," and the latter in turn penetrated the study of biology to produce what we now call "molecular biology. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
1160:Ladies and gentlemen, you see before you the ultimate repository of human knowledge: Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ‘Stravaganza. History, art, science, nature, wonders of earth and sky, marvels of science and technology, tales of strange places and faraway lands, where the miraculous is workaday, all are within. See the mighty works of ROTECH at first hand through the Adam Black Patent Opticon; hear Adam Black’s tales of mystery and imagination from the four quarters of the globe; marvel at the latest developments in science and technology; wonder at the train, yes, this very train, which drives itself with a mind of its own; goggle in amazement at the Dumbletonians, half man, half machine,; learn of the mysteries of physics, of chemistry, of philosophy, of theology, art and nature; all this can be yours, ladies and gentlemen, this cornucopia of ancient wisdom; your for only fifty centavos, yes fifty centavos, or equivalent value in whatever commodity you choose: yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Adam Black presents his Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ‘Stravaganza! ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
1161:To use an analogy, the "leadership is the answer to everything" perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages.
In the 1500's, people ascribed all events they didn't understand to God.
Why did the crops fail? God did it.
Why did we have an earthquake? God did it.
What holds the planets in place? God.
But with the Enlightenment, we began the search for a more scientific understanding - physics, chemistry, biology and so forth. Not that we become atheists, but we gained deeper understanding about how the universe ticks.
Similarly, every time we attribute everything to 'Leadership," we're no different from the people in the 1500's. We're simply admitting our ignorance. Not that we should become leadership atheists (leadership does matter), but every time we throw our hands up in frustration - reverting back to "well, the answer must be Leadership!" - we prevent ourselves from gaining deeper, more scientific understanding about what makes great companies tick. ~ James C Collins,#NFDB
1162:Yes, Doctor,' I said. 'In brief, your argument is that Life is a thing, state, fact, or element, call-it-what-you-like, which requires the Material through which to manifest itself, and that given the Material, plus the Conditions, the result is Life. In other words, that Life is an evolved product, manifested through Matter, and bred of Conditions - eh?'
'As we understand the word,' said the old Doctor. 'Though, mind you, there may be a third factor. But, in my heart, I believe that it is a matter of chemistry; Conditions and a suitable medium; but given the Conditions, the Brute is so almighty that it will seize upon anything through which to manifest itself. It is a Force generated by Conditions; but nevertheless this does not bring us one iota nearer to its explanation, any more than to the explanation of Electricity or Fire. They are, all three, of the Outer Forces - Monsters of the Void. Nothing we can do will create any one of them; our power is merely to be able, by providing the Conditions, to make each one of them manifest to our physical senses. Am I clear?'
("The Derelict") ~ William Hope Hodgson,#NFDB
1163:If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1164:If you look at yourself right now, sometimes the outside situations decide what kind of person you are, isn’t it? Right now, if someone in front of you acts nasty, you will act nastier than him. Not necessarily, just an example, okay? (Laughter). Somebody gets angry with you, you get angry with him. Sometimes your chemistry takes over, sometimes your hormones take over, something else takes over, so many forces are ruling you in a compulsive way. These moments you are not really a human being. You are many things in human form.
There are certain moments when you are very conscious, when you are fully aware of what you are doing, only in those moments do you truly function as a human being. If you were fully aware and conscious of what you are doing with this moment, the way you function in this world and within yourself would be very different, isn’t it? If you were very consciously creating every process of life in you, you would definitely make yourself into a very blissful and ecstatic being. Whenever you are in a state where you are very happy and joyful, you are a wonderful person for everybody around you. ~ Sadhguru,#NFDB
1165:Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado, #NFDB
1166:Hiya, Alex. I missed you tonight."
My gaze rests on Sam. "Yeah, I see how much you missed me."
"Sam? Oh, I don't really like him," she coos, coming close. I can smell the mota radiating off her. "I'm waiting for you to come back to me."
"Not gonna happen."
"Is it because of your stupid chemistry partner?" She grabs ray chin, trying to force me to look at her, her long nails digging into my skin.
I grab both her wrists and pull them aside, all the time wondering how my tough-as-nails ex-girlfriend turned into a tough-as-nails bitch. "Brittany has nothin' to do with you and me. I hear you've been talkin' shit to her."
"Did Isa tell you that?" she asks, her eyes narrowed into slits.
"Just back off," I say, ignoring her question, "or you'll have a lot more to deal with than a bitter ex-boyfriend."
"Are you bitter, Alex? Because you don't act bitter. You act like you don't give a shit."
She's right. After I found her sleeping around, it took me a while to get over it, get over her. I wondered what other guys were giving her that I couldn't.
"I used to give a shit," I tell her. "I don't now. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1167:The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out. ~ Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) pp. 9-10., #NFDB
1168:Diary entry, summer 1973. It may be there in a distracted glance out of an open window or in the split second of an absent look when you speak to her, or in the guarded inflections of her voice as she replies, or in the subtle chemistry of touch or smell or the taste of her skin in your mouth, or in some unspecified sixth sense that you can’t name, but when love is over, its signals are louder than disclosure, if only you are willing and open enough to acknowledge them. But of course we shake off these feelings as if they were mere irritations, as if they were unimportant and uninvited guests at a feast. “Not now,” you say, fobbing them off with shallow excuses and feigning more urgent business elsewhere. But they linger long after the party, and skulk in a corner where they plot and fester and return to ask their impertinent questions in the still of night, when she’s sleeping and wearing her child’s face. When she looks so beautiful and vulnerable with her mouth slightly open, and her hair a mess on the pillow, but as you reach to touch her, she turns unconsciously away toward the window, and then the questions start again, and you can’t sleep…. ~ Sting, #NFDB
1169:The need to pull him to her and take his mouth, feel that lean body against hers, throbbed through her. God, she seemed to meet one of the criteria for joining Nemesis—the fact that they were in this haunted chamber, deciding the fate of their villainous prey, and she wanted nothing more than to push him down onto the bed and finish what they’d started the other night—clearly she was out of her mind. Her feelings at that moment must have been transparent. A look of fierce hunger crossed his face, and she could’ve sworn he growled deep in his chest. “I was wrong,” he rumbled. “The danger’s not from the Larkfields, or the other servants. It’s us. We’re like goddamn nitroglycerin.”
“Any way to neutralize nitroglycerin?” She sounded as if she’d run up ten flights of stairs. “Might be. I’m not a scientist.” His eyes darkened. “But I don’t want to get rid of the chemistry between us. We’d create a hell of an explosion.” Heat swept along her body. With the brief tastes she’d had of what they could be together, the pleasure they could give each other, they’d probably level everything around them within miles. And curse her if she didn’t want that. ~ Zoe Archer,#NFDB
1170:From Desire to Reality in Six Easy Steps Six definite practical steps to transform a burning desire into reality. Fix in your mind an exact picture of what you desire. It's not sufficient merely to say, for example, "I want plenty of money." Be definite as to the amount. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the thing you desire. There's no such reality as something for nothing. Establish a definite date by which you intend to possess the desired thing. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you feel entirely ready or not to put this plan into action. Write out a clear, concise statement of your responses to the preceding four steps. Read your written statement aloud twice daily. Once after arising in the morning and once just before retiring at night. As you read, see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of whatever your goal happens to be. "Through some strange and powerful principle of mental chemistry, nature wraps up in the impulse [of a] strong desire that something which recognizes no such word as impossible and accepts no such reality as failure." - Napoleon Hill ~ Earl Nightingale, #NFDB
1171:If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate. But no one ever asked. I’m pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition. I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears, which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo, ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
1172:Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.
I know how wrong this is.
When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.
It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
1173:Our memories are in part reconstructions. Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit, updating the past according to our present concerns and understanding. At the cellular level, LeDoux explains, retrieving a memory means it will be “reconsolidated,” slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that will help store it anew after being updated.40 Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness. But the high road can bring reason to the low. If at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning.41 One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1174:The notion that electromagnetic energy exists as discrete packets of energy rather than a continuous stream became the foundation on which physicists erected what is inarguably the most successful (and strangest) theory in the history of science. The laws of quantum physics not only replicate all the successes of the classical theory they supplanted (that is, a quantum calculation produces an answer at least as accurate as a classical one in problems ranging from the fall of an apple to the flight of a spaceship). They also succeed where the laws of classical physics fail. It is quantum physics, not classical physics, that explains the burning of stars, accounts for the structure of elementary particles, predicts the order of elements in the periodic table, and describes the physics of the newborn universe. Although devised to explain atomic and electromagnetic phenomena, quantum physics has “yielded a deep understanding of chemistry and the solid state,” noted the physicist Daniel Greenberger, a leading quantum theorist: quantum physics spawned quantum technologies, including transistors, lasers, semiconductors, light-emitting diodes, scans, PET scans, and MRI machines. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1175:I’m going to forget the kiss with Alex happened even though I was up all night replaying it in my head. As I’m driving to school the day after the kiss that never happened, I wonder if I should ignore Alex. Although that’s not an option because we have chemistry together.
Oh, no. Chemistry class. Will Colin suspect something? Maybe someone saw us drive off together yesterday and told him. Last night I turned off my cell so I didn’t have to talk to anyone.
Ugh. I wish my life wasn’t so complicated. I have a boyfriend. Okay, so my boyfriend’s been acting pushy lately, interested only in sex. And I’m sick of it.
But Alex as my boyfriend would never work. His mom already hates me. His ex-girlfriend wants to kill me--another bad sign. He even smokes, which is totally not cool. I could make a huge list of all the negatives.
Okay, so there might be some positives. A few minor ones too insignificant to mention.
He’s smart.
He has eyes so expressive they give a hint to more than what he portrays.
He’s dedicated to his friends, family, and even his motorcycle.
He touched me as if I were made of glass.
He kissed me as if he’d savor it for the rest of his life. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1176:But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.
This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused.
Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars - all this in its entirety.
The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it - only differently.
One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relations: relation is reciprocity.
Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. ~ Martin Buber,#NFDB
1177:In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
1178:In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture... by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen C. Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
1179:Sophia, I’m afraid you’re going to have to face the fact that your sister may not be as strong as you think. There’s no way she can resist Baird indefinitely.” She crossed her arms over her full breasts, a look of stubborn refusal in her lovely eyes. “You Kindred think you’re so hot. He’s an okay looking guy but no man is irresistible.” “He’s not but his mating scent is—at least to your sister.” Sylvan didn’t know why he was telling her this—it would only make her angrier, he was sure. But he wanted to soften the blow for her, help her accept the inevitable—that no matter how much she loved her sister, she was destined to lose Olivia to another who loved and needed her more. “His mating scent? What are you talking about?” Sophia’s green eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “When the Kindred claim a mate, our body chemistry changes in order to attract them. We start releasing some very strong pheromones that are tailored specifically to their DNA. Those pheromones act as an irresistible enticement to our prospective mates.” Sylvan shrugged. “Very few women in any of the trade worlds we have visited have been able to overcome their influence and resist the temptation to bond with the warrior who has chosen them.” “My ~ Evangeline Anderson, #NFDB
1180:I had never in my life made something for someone else that wasn't a cup of tea. True, I could download a food app on my phone or leaf through one of the cookbooks Leander kept on the counter (though I didn't want to consider why he owned a copy of 38 Meals for Your Picky Toddler), but I was intelligent. I was capable. I could figure this out for myself.
An hour later, I nudged open the bedroom door, carrying a tray.
Watson sat up on his elbows. "What do you have there?" he asked, his voice coated in sleep.
"I made you breakfast."
"How domestic of you." He picked up his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. "That's - that's a rather large plate you've got there. Plates?"
"This is tray one of four," I said, placing it at the end of the bed.
He blinked at me. Perhaps he was still tired.
"Don't begin eating until you see all your options," I told him, and went off to fetch the next platter.
By the time I'd arranged it all on my coverlet to my satisfaction, Watson had roused himself appropriately. He'd put on one of my oversized sleep shirts - CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS - and poured himself a cup of coffee. That surprised me; he usually took tea.
"I need real caffeine to deal with this. ~ Brittany Cavallaro,#NFDB
1181:In chemistry class I write Peter a note
You were right about Josh.
I tap him on the back and slip the note in his hand. When he reads it, he sits up straight and immediately scrawls something back.
Be more specific.
He kissed me.
When Peter stiffens, I am ashamed to say that I feel a little bit vindicated. I wait for him to write back, but he doesn’t. As soon as the bell rings, he turns around and says, “What the hell? How did that even happen?”
“He came over to help us trim the tree.”
“And then what? He kissed you in front of Kitty?”
“No! It was just the two of us at the house.”
Peter looks really irritated, and I’m starting to regret mentioning it. “What the hell is he thinking, kissing my girlfriend? It’s fucking ridiculous. I’m gonna say something to him.”
“Wait, what? No!”
“I have to, Lara Jean. He can’t just get away with it.”
I stand up and start packing up my bag. “You’d better not say anything to him, Peter. I mean it.”
Peter watches me silently. And then he asks, “Did you kiss him back?”
“What does it matter?”
He looks taken aback. “Are you mad at me for something?”
“No,” I say. “But I will be if you say anything to Josh.”
“Fine,” he says.
“Fine,” I say back. ~ Jenny Han,#NFDB
1182:Everything and anything is raw fodder for creating heat or light. It all depends on the connections you make and insights you surface to buttress your opinion. More broadly speaking, though, I told Bojia, column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When I say your own values, priorities, and aspirations, I mean the things that you care about most and aspire to see implemented most intensely. That value set helps you determine what is important and worth opining about, as well as what you will say. It is okay to change your mind as an opinion writer; what is not okay is to have no mind—to stand for nothing, or for everything, or only for easy and safe things. An opinion writer has to emerge from some framework of values that shapes his or her thinking about what should be supported or opposed. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
1183:If you think about the life of the universe as we all have learned it from Carl Sagan, you know that we all began as an infinitely small, dense, hot dot. But that didn’t last long, because there wasn’t much going on, because there was so much energy that no arrangements could be made. Then there was a massive explosion and a tremendous drop in temperature. And at that point electrons could settle into orbits around atomic nuclei and you get atomic chemistry, which condenses into stars made of pure hydrogen and helium, which cook out iron and carbon: you get more complex chemistry with more complex bond possibilities. This allows the molecular bond to form for the first time. Suddenly an entirely new universe of possibilities springs into being. And at the end of that cascade of possibilities is organic life. Organic life, then, contorts and conserves information and folds it in upon itself and replicates it and distorts it, and you get more and more advanced forms of higher plant organisms, plants, and animals. Ultimately, this process ushers into human beings with culture; electronic culture. And then, finally, the cataclysmic connectedness of the 20th century. From a psychedelic point of view this is all a connected process. ~ Terence McKenna, The Edge Runner, #NFDB
1184:What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1185:We got dressed, and walked downstairs and into the parlor. Everyone was clean in the clean parlor, and waiting for supper, sitting patiently but unrelaxed; with labor past, with hands unbusied, with mind unmolested, they sat very tired waiting for their food and for their few hours of quiet and for their few hours of sleep; and for the next morning, and for the next evening, and for a Sunday, and for another week and Sunday; for autumn and for winter, for spring and for summer; for another year, for another ten; for the slow chemistry of change and age; for the loss of pigments and tissues, of senses and wits, of faculties and perceptions; for the silencing of all clamor and the sealing of all sight; for the final levelling of all desire, of all despair, of all joy, of all tribulations; for the final quelling of all fear and pride and love and disaffection; for the final dissolution of the flesh and of all that flesh must suffer, sickness of soul and body, fast-withering delight and clouded love, unkindness and grief and wrong beyond reckoning; for the final resolution of all the good they had wrought, and all the ill; they sat resting after battle, with quiet hands and unperceiving eyes, without emotion to receive once more the deliberate edge of evening. ~ James Agee, #NFDB
1186:THROUGH THE BREADTH and scope of existence, the essence of your being has traveled, gathering experiences of every human emotion, situation, nationality, race, gender, and type of death and birth. This indefinable essence, which has traveled across time, is a vast storehouse of unlimited knowledge and possibilities contained in a collection of memories that are locked deep inside you. What exactly is this pearl of great price? It is your soul. Over the years, I have received many messages from Spirit describing the nature of the soul. Descriptions range from it being the nucleus of our being, to the power within, to the core of freedom. Scientists, metaphysicians, and psychologists have referred to the soul as the “super conscious.” I know it as the source of all intelligent energy wherein our true selves reside. Only a thin veil of human amnesia hides our own truth from us. The soul exists on many different levels of consciousness. It can be present on the physical plane and coexist on another dimension simultaneously. The soul is not human; therefore it does not possess human chemistry. However, it is colored by an accumulation of human lifetimes. The soul is always evolving, growing, and expanding based on the choices we make during the situations that come upon us. ~ James Van Praagh, #NFDB
1187:Love is un-natural. Do any of these traits come naturally? Granted, we know how to turn them all on when we’re winning and wooing. But love does not sustain itself naturally. What come naturally are passion, lust, chemistry, and that “can’t wait to get you alone” feeling. But over time, all of that is eventually squashed by our unbridled, selfish, self-preserving natures. The brand of love Paul describes is a nonnegotiable for those desiring to sustain the chemistry and romance that make the early days of a relationship so exhilarating. Romance is sustained by patience, kindness, humility, and a short memory. While none of those things come naturally, every one of them is necessary. Otherwise our wounds, insecurities, and parental implants will become the driving forces and send the relationship in a bad direction. When that happens, good-bye, chemistry. Good-bye, romance. Hello, I guess I just haven’t met the right person. It’s that kind of thinking that creates the myth. It’s a myth to think that once you meet the right person, you will become a different person. The love of your life should bring out the best in you. But only you can prevent forest fires. Sorry. Only you can prevent your impatience, unkindness, pride, anger, and record keeping from undermining your relationship. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
1188:He looks at me with chocolate brown eyes that are so intense I swear they could hypnotize someone. “You ready?” he asks.
For a nanosecond, as I’m staring into those dark eyes, I wonder what it would be like to kiss Alex. My gaze drops to his lips. For less than a nanosecond, I can almost feel them coming closer. Would his lips be hard on mine, or soft? Is he a slow kisser, or hungry and fast like his personality?
“For what?” I whisper as I lean closer.
“The project,” he says. “Hand warmers. Peterson’s class. Chemistry.”
I shake my head, clearing all ridiculous thoughts from my overactive teenage mind. I must be sleep-deprived. “Yeah, hand warmers.” I open my chem book.
“Brittany?”
“What?” I say, staring blindly at the words on the page. I have no clue what I’m reading because I’m too embarrassed to concentrate.
“You were lookin’ at me like you wanted to kiss me.”
I force a laugh. “Yeah, right,” I say sarcastically.
“Nobody’s watchin’ if you want to, you know, try it. Not to brag, but I’m somewhat of an expert.”
He gives me a lazy smile, one that was probably created to melt girls’ hearts all over the globe.
“Alex, you’re not my type.” I need to tell him something to stop him from looking at me like he’s planning to do things to me I’ve only heard about. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1189:Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, the founder of Egyptian learning, the Wise Man of the ancient world, gave to the priests and philosophers of antiquity the secrets which have been preserved to this day in myth and legend. These allegories and emblematic figures conceal the secret formulæ for spiritual, mental, moral, and physical regeneration commonly known as the Mystic Chemistry of the Soul (alchemy). These sublime truths were communicated to the initiates of the Mystery Schools, but were concealed from the profane. The latter, unable to understand the abstract philosophical tenets, worshiped the concrete sculptured idols which were emblematic of these secret truths. The wisdom and secrecy of Egypt are epitomized in the Sphinx, which has preserved its secret from the seekers of a hundred generations. The mysteries of Hermeticism, the great spiritual truths hidden from the world by the ignorance of the world, and the keys of the secret doctrines of the ancient philosophers, are all symbolized by the Virgin Isis. Veiled from head to foot, she reveals her wisdom only to the tried and initiated few who have earned the right to enter her sacred presence, tear from the veiled figure of Nature its shroud of obscurity, and stand face to face with the Divine Reality. ~ Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of all Ages, #NFDB
1190:What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1191:Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright — that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1192:Elegy
Let them bury your big eyes
In the secret earth securely,
Your thin fingers, and your fair,
Soft, indefinite-colored hair,—
All of these in some way, surely,
From the secret earth shall rise;
Not for these I sit and stare,
Broken and bereft completely;
Your young flesh that sat so neatly
On your little bones will sweetly
Blossom in the air.
But your voice,—never the rushing
Of a river underground,
Not the rising of the wind
In the trees before the rain,
Not the woodcock's watery call,
Not the note the white-throat utters,
Not the feet of children pushing
Yellow leaves along the gutters
In the blue and bitter fall,
Shall content my musing mind
For the beauty of that sound
That in no new way at all
Ever will be heard again.
Sweetly through the sappy stalk
Of the vigorous weed,
Holding all it held before,
Cherished by the faithful sun,
On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done;
But the music of your talk
Never shall the chemistry
Of the secret earth restore.
All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
35
Beats the golden bird no more.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay,#NFDB
1193:A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
1194:Lovelock comments in response . . . We [as scientists] had become so used to thinking in terms of cause and effect that we no longer seemed to realize that the whole could be more than the sum of its parts. . . . The Earth self regulates its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself habitable and it is this that is the sticking point for many, if not most, scientists. Such a conclusion could never have come from reductionist thinking, and that is why arguments with biologists and others over Gaia have been so acrimonious for so long. The fact that reductionist science cannot offer a rational explanation for quantum phenomena like entanglement, nor of whole systems phenomena such as emergence, does not mean that these phenomena do not exist. Their existence confirms the limits of the Cartesian view of the universe. . . . Eminent representatives of the Earth and Life sciences secure in their disciplines ignored the fact that organisms massively alter their environment as well as adapting to it, and they did not see the evolution of the organisms and the evolution of their environment as a single coupled process. . . . I know it is unrealistic to expect them to welcome a theory like Gaia, which not only asks them to join together as if married but also to take a vow to believe in the phenomena of emergence. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
1195:healing is the result of not just clinical processes but also of overall biological potentialities that often do not materialize without the unseen power of spiritual alignment. Chemistry is within the predictable Newtonian discipline of scientific (linear content) expectation, but health recovery is greatly facilitated by the unseen power of the spiritual dimensions of intentionality of consciousness itself (nonlinear context). The clinical power and influential impact of spiritual context is overwhelmingly displayed by the millions of recoveries from medically hopeless illnesses as exhibited by worldwide membership in faith-based organizations of which Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles (ACIM) are prime examples. Since the basic principles of faith-based recoveries are outside the paradigm of the reality of academic science, their importance was not studied or comprehended because academic science was concerned with just content and not context. The emergence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle finally accorded respectability for the recognition of the reality and influence of the effect of consciousness itself. Thus, the power of intention came to be recognized as an important critical factor in catalyzing potentiality into actuality. (See Stapp’s Mindful Universe for correlation of quantum theory, consciousness, and intention. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
1196:Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."
Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."
Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things. ~ Peter Ames Carlin,#NFDB
1197:Have you ever been swept away by a toxic lover who sucked you dry? I have. Bad men used to light me up like a Christmas tree. If I had a choice between the rebel without a cause and a nice guy in a sweater and outdoorsy shoes, you can imagine who got my phone number. Rebels and rogues are smooth (and somewhat untamed); they know the headwaiters at the best steak houses, ride fast European motorcycles, and start bar fights in your honor. In short, the rebel makes you feel really alive! It’s all fun and games until he screws your best friend or embezzles your life’s savings. You may be asking yourself how my pathetic dating track record relates to your diet. Simple. The acid—alkaline balance, which relates to the chemistry of your body’s fluids and tissues as measured by pH. The rebel/rogue = acid. The nice solid guy = alkaline. The solid guy gives you energy; he’s reliable and trustworthy. The solid guy calls you back when he says he will. He helps you clean your garage and does yoga with you. He’s even polite to your family no matter how whacked they are, and has the sexual stamina to rock your world. While the rebel can help you let your hair down, too much rebel will sap your energy. In time, a steady rebellious diet burns you out. But when we’re addicted to bad boys (junk food, fat, sugar, and booze), nice men (veggies and whole grains) seem boring. Give them a chance! ~ Kris Carr, #NFDB
1198:Before we seal our plans with a kiss, Alex clears his throat in front of us. “No PDA. School rules. Besides, she’s my partner, dickhead. Not yours.”
“Shut up, Fuentes,” Colin mutters, then joins Darlene.
I put my hand on my hip and glare at Alex. “Since when are you so concerned with school rules?”
“Since you became my chem partner. Outside chemistry, you’re his. In chemistry, you’re mine.”
“Want to find your club and pull me by my hair into the library?”
“I’m not a Neanderthal. Your boyfriend is the ape, not me.”
“Then stop acting like one.” All of the work tables in the library are taken, so we’re forced to find a corner in the back of the library in the secluded nonfiction section and sit on the carpet. I set my books down and realize Alex is starting at me, almost as if he stares long enough he might be able to see the real me. No chance of that because I hide my true self from everyone.
I stare back, because two can play this game. On the surface he’s impermeable, except a scar above his left brow tells the truth…he’s human. His shirt outlines muscles you can get only from manual labor or working out regularly.
When my eyes meet his gaze as we’re sitting here staring at each other, time stops. Those eyes are piercing mine, and I can swear at this moment he senses the real me. The one without the attitude, without the façade. Just Brittany. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1199:Women often make communication mistakes that undermine their irresistibility and send men running faster than you can say, “Marriage and kids!”
First of all, most of us don’t really listen. What we do is judge whether we like or dislike what a man is saying to us, decide whether we agree or disagree with what he’s saying, or determine whether we know it already. We also listen to see if what he is saying fits our agenda (like our agenda to have a boyfriend, get married, or have kids). This is not true listening.
True listening happens when you drop those internal conversations in your mind and simply hear what a man is saying to you from his perspective, as though what he is saying is the most important thing on earth and you need to hear every single word. You don’t interpret, analyze, or read into it. You don’t say, “In other words . . .,” and go on to put into words what you think he means. You just take it in.
When you truly listen, you become instantly attractive. By really hearing a man, you make him feel special and cared for in a very powerful way. If there’s genuine chemistry between you, he’ll continue to share more and more of himself because of how open and receptive you are to who he actually is (not who you are trying to get him to be). I cannot emphasize this point enough. If you really want to make every man want you, become a masterful listener. ~ Marie Forleo,#NFDB
1200:If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking.
If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard.
If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let’s face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I’m sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God.
In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself.
And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place—a “madhouse” where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions.
Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid. ~ Neal Shusterman,#NFDB
1201:Peter and I are at Starbucks, sitting side by side, studying for our chemistry exam. Idly, he puts his arm around my chair and starts twisting my hair around his pencil and letting it unfurl like a slice of ribbon. I ignore him. He pulls my chair closer to his and plants a warm kiss on my neck, which makes me giggle. I scoot away from him. “I can’t concentrate when you do that.”
“You said you like when I play with your hair.”
“I do, but I’m trying to study.” I look around and then whisper, “Besides, we’re in public.”
“There’s hardly anybody in here!”
“There’s the barista, and that guy over there by the door.” I try to discreetly point with my pencil. Things have been quiet at school; the last thing we need is another meme flare-up.
“Lara Jean, nobody’s going to film us if that’s what you’re worried about. We’re not doing anything.”
“I told you from the start I’m not into PDAs,” I remind him.
Peter smirks. “Really? Let’s not forget who kissed who in the hallway. You literally jumped on top of me, Covey.”
I blush. “There was a purpose for that and you know it.”
“There’s a purpose now,” he pouts. “The purpose is I’m bored and I feel like kissing you. Is that a crime?”
“You’re such a baby,” I say, pinching his nose hard. “If you stay quiet and study for forty-five more minutes, I’ll let you kiss me in the privacy of your car.”
Peter’s face lights up. “Deal. ~ Jenny Han,#NFDB
1202:And it occurred to me then that
you would not escape, that
there were awful men
who’d laid plans for you,
and I could not stop them.
Prince Jones was the
superlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christian,
scion of a striving class,
patron saint of the twice as
good, could be forever
bound, who then could
not? And the plunder was
not just of Prince alone.
Think of all the love
poured into him. Think of
the tuitions for Montessori
and music lessons. Think
of the gasoline expended,
the treads worn carting
him to football games,
basketball tournaments,
and Little League. Think of
the time spent regulating
sleepovers. Think of the
surprise birthday parties,
the daycare, and the
reference checks on
babysitters. Think of
World Book and
Childcraft. Think of checks
written for family photos.
Think of credit cards
charged for vacations.
Think of soccer balls,
science kits, chemistry
sets, racetracks, and model
trains. Think of all the
embraces, all the private
jokes, customs, greetings,
names, dreams, all the
shared knowledge and
capacity of a black family
injected into that vessel of
flesh and bone. And think
of how that vessel was
taken, shattered on the
concrete, and all its holy
contents, all that had gone
into him, sent flowing back
to the earth. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,#NFDB
1203:Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant quids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, new anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins, the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers, redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers, swimming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performances artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion, Soap has been afraid of all of these things at one time or another, Ever since he went to prison, he's realized that he doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much everything. ~ Kelly Link, #NFDB
1204:It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind,
…Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath.
There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting. ~ Paula Fox,#NFDB
1205:Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.
It a very easy mistake to make, though.. She’d refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she’d felt that the “darkness” was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.
You didn’t have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. “You’re very hard on yourself,” Luke said.
“Can you imagine the kind of person that I’d be if I wasn’t hard on myself?” she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.
Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She’d done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn’t ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she’d felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified. ~ Meg Howrey,#NFDB
1206:It is remarkable, however, that at the very lowest point of Kant's depression, when he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, [Footnote: Physical Geography, in opposition to Political.] chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler’s, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear). ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
1207:Historic Evening
On an evening, for example, when the naive tourist has retired
from our economic horrors, a master's hand awakens
the meadow's harpsichord;
they are playing cards at the bottom of the pond,
mirror conjuring up favorites and queens;
there are saints, veils, threads of harmony,
and legendary chromatics in the setting sun.
He shudders as the hunts and hordes go by.
Comedy drips on the grass stages.
And the distress of the poor and of the weak
on those stupid planes! Before his slave's vision,
Germany goes scaffolding toward moons;
Tartar deserts light up; ancient revolts ferment
in the center of the Celestial Empire;
over stairways and armchairs of rock, a little world, wan and flat,
Africa and Occidents, will be erected.
Then a ballet of familiar seas and nights,
worthless chemistry and impossible melodies. The same bourgeois magic
wherever the mail-train sets you down.
Even the most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible
to submit to this personal atmosphere, fog of physical remorse,
which to acknowledge is already an affliction. No!
The moment of the seething cauldron, of seas removed,
of subterranean conflagrations, of the planet swept away,
and the consequent exterminations, certitudes indicated
with so little malice by the Bible and by the Norns
and for which serious persons should be on the alert
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1208:There’s no use arguing that modern society isn’t a kind of paradise. The vast majority of us don’t, personally, have to grow or kill our own food, build our own dwellings, or defend ourselves from wild animals and enemies. In one day we can travel a thousand miles by pushing our foot down on a gas pedal or around the world by booking a seat on an airplane. When we are in pain we have narcotics that dull it out of existence, and when we are depressed we have pills that change the chemistry of our brains. We understand an enormous amount about the universe, from subatomic particles to our own bodies to galaxy clusters, and we use that knowledge to make life even better and easier for ourselves. The poorest people in modern society enjoy a level of physical comfort that was unimaginable a thousand years ago, and the wealthiest people literally live the way gods were imagined to have. And yet. There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It’s how we evolved to exist, and it obviously works. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
1209:We have seen quite a few cats being let out of the bag- the mathematical mind, which is supposed to have such a dry, logical, rational texture. As a last example in this chapter I shall quote the dramatic case of Friedrich August von Kekule', Professor of Chemistry in Ghent, who, one afternoon in 1865, fell asleep and dreamt what was probably the most important dream in history since Joseph's seven fat and seven lean cows:
I turned my chair to the fire and dozed, he relates. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke...Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.
The serpent biting its own tail gave Kekule' the clue to a discovery which has been called 'the most brilliant piece of prediction to be found in the whole range of organic chemistry' and which, in fact, is one of the cornerstones of modern science. Put in a somewhat simplified manner, it consisted in the revolutionary proposal that the molecules of certain important organic compounds are not open structures but closed chains or 'rings'-like the snake swallowing its tail. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
1210:Perplexed about entropy? You are not alone. Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) understood this confusion all too well, almost 150 years ago, “ . . . a method involving the notion of entropy, the very existence of which depends upon the second law of thermodynamics, will doubtless seem to many far-fetched, and may repel beginners as obscure and difficult of comprehension. This inconvenience is perhaps more than counter-balanced by the advantages of a method which makes the second law of thermodynamics so prominent, and gives it so clear and elementary an expression. . . . (1).” Gibbs profoundly altered our understanding of chemistry with his insights. At a time when it was mostly a philosophical concept, Gibbs went straight for application and made entropy relevant. Rapid advancements and heralded achievements in the chemical sciences ensued. Enthalpy (H) is a measure of the internal energy of a system, but this energy has an availability issue; some of that energy is useful, some is not. Enthalpy also provides no information about the spontaneity of energy exchange. Entropy (S) does indicate the probability of energy exchange (i.e., spontaneous, −∆S, or nonspontaneous, +∆S), but it is not useful energy and so it provides little information on the quantity of energy that is available to perform work. Energy that is available to perform useful work is known as Gibbs energy, symbolized as G. Gibbs energy has also been termed free energy. Yet energy is anything but “free” and so that term will not be used here ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1211:I reach into the hat and pull out a little white slip of paper. I open it slowly while I bite my lower lip in anticipation. In bold letters I read HAND WARMERS.
“Hand warmers?” I question.
Alex leans over and reads the paper with a confused look on his face. “What the fuck are hand warmers?”
Mrs. Peterson shoots Alex a warning glare. “If you’d like to stay after school, I have another blue detention slip on my desk with your name already on it. Now, either ask the question again without using foul language or join me after school.”
“That’d be cool to hang with you, Mrs. P., but I’d rather spend the time studyin’ with my chem partner,” Alex responds, then has the nerve to wink at Colin, “so I’ll rephrase the question. What exactly are hand warmers?”
“Thermal chemistry, Mr. Fuentes. We use them to warm our hands.”
Alex has this big, cocky grin as he turns to me. “I’m sure we can find other things to warm.”
“I hate you,” I say loud enough for Colin and the rest of the class to hear. If I sit here and let him get the best of me, I’ll probably hear my mom tsk’ing in my head about reputation meaning everything.
I know the class is watching out interaction, even Isabel, who thinks Alex isn’t as bad as everyone thinks he is. Can’t she see him for what he is, or is she blinded by his chiseled face and popular status among their friends?
Alex whispers, “There’s a thin line between love and hate. Maybe you’re confusing your emotions.”
I scoot away from him. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“I would. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1212:What the hell," I said, pushing off the wall, ready to take off the head of whatever stupid salesperson had decided to get cozy with me. My elbow was still buzzing, and I could feel a hot flush creeping up my neck: bad signs. I knew my temper.
I turned my head and saw it wasn't a salesman at all. It was a guy with black curly hair, around my age, wearing a bright orange T-shirt. And for some reason he was smiling.
"Hey there," he said cheerfully. "How's it going?"
"What is your problem?" I snapped, rubbing my elbow.
"Problem?"
"You just slammed me into the wall, asshole."
He blinked. "Goodness," he said finally. "Such language."
I just looked at him. Wrong day, buddy, I thought. You caught me on the wrong day.
"The thing is," he said, as if we'd been discussing the weather or world politics, "I saw you out in the showroom. I was over by the tire display?"
I was sure I was glaring at him. But he kept talking.
"I just thought to myself, all of a sudden, that we had something in common. A natural chemistry, if you will. And I had a feeling that something big was going to happen. To both of us. That we were, in fact, meant to be together."
"You got all this," I said, clarifying, "at the tire display?"
"You didn't feel it?" he asked.
"No. I did, however, feel you slamming me into the wall," I said evenly.
"That," he said, lowering his voice and leaning closer to me, "was an accident. An oversight. Just an unfortunate result of the enthusiasm I felt knowing I was about to talk to you. ~ Sarah Dessen,#NFDB
1213:A surprise isn't a surprise if you blow it ahead of time."
She shook her head. "That sounds a lot like 'a wish won't come true unless you say it out loud.'" The words were out of her mouth before she could bit them back. The last thing she needed was for either of them to be thinking about their real-life kiss in this land of make-believe.
With a hint of a grin, Trent lifted her chin with his fingers and smoothed the pad of his thumb across her lips. "And look how well that worked out for me."
Cyn's heart surged, her pulse rushing like the water over the falls. Was he going to kiss her again?
Trent pulled her close, anchoring her against him on the slippery rocks. He threaded his fingers through her hair, cupped the back of her neck, and kissed her lightly, tentatively. Cyn tensed a moment, then relaxed as she gave in and pressed her palms to his pecs, grasping handfuls of firm muscle.
The camera was rolling, after all, but it wouldn't capture the sparks firing through her. She'd replayed the wish-upon-a-star kiss in her mind so many times, thinking how incredible it was with Trent - that elusive chemistry she hadn't found with anyone else. But as the weeks had passed, she'd wondered if she imagined it. This kiss made her believe that she hadn't. The softness of his lips. The sensual sweep of his tongue. The pressure of his hand at the small of her back. His skin was warm and wet against hers. She was nearly dizzy with sensation as he trailed light kisses along her jawline and whispered in her ear. "Even better than last time. ~ Tracy March,#NFDB
1214:Okay, well, here are the best or most popular picks who still have one opening left: Heather Herr, Blair, Heidi, Noel, Heather Long, and Amy.”
Ashton stood beside her locker, trying to appear as if she wasn’t listening. I could see her watching me from the corner of her eyes. That caught my attention. The ache that had taken up residence in my chest these days squeezed, reminding me why it was there. Would this feeling ever go away? How long would seeing her hurt so bad?”
“Oh, and Ashton, of course.” Kayla’s chipper tone finally said the one word I couldn’t drown out.
“What about Ashton?” I asked, tearing my gaze away from her to stare down at Kayla.
“She’s still available. No one has picked her, except Sawyer, of course. I don’t think anyone will. No one wants her because they know they won’t be getting any special treatment from her. All the special treatment she’ll be dishing out will be for Sawyer.”
“I want her.”
“You do? Really?”
“Yes.”
“But you know Noel has a thing for you, and I can promise she’ll meet all your needs--” Kayla started saying.
“I want Ashton,” I repeated and glared down at her again before turning and heading outside to the field house.
Asking for Ashton might be opening myself up to more pain, but the thought of her doing things for Sawyer was enough to drive me crazy. The thought of her having to bake cookies, decorate a locker, and make cards for another guy infuriated me. Besides, I wasn’t doing so great in chemistry. I needed some tutoring. The one-on-one kind where boyfriends weren’t allowed. ~ Abbi Glines,#NFDB
1215:Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".
To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.
Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. ~ Paul Davies,#NFDB
1216:We often fail to grasp the seriousness of the menace to the Jewish heritage involved in the modern ideology because we use the term "traditional conception of God" loosely. If we use it in the sense of the belief in the existence of a supreme being as defined by the most advanced Jewish thinkers in the past, there is nothing in that belief which cannot be made compatible with views held by many a modern thinker of note. But if by the term "traditional conception of God" we mean the specific facts recorded in the Bible about the way God revealed himself and intervened in the affairs of men, then tradition and the modern ideology are irreconcilable.
The chief opposition to the traditional conception of God in that sense arises not from the scientific approach to the study of nature in general, or even man in general. It arises from the objective study of history. The natural sciences like physics and chemistry cannot disprove the possibility of miracles, though they may assert their improbability. But the objective study of history has established the fact that the records of miracles are unreliable, and that the stories about them are merely the product of the popular imagination. The traditional conception of God is challenged by history, anthropology and psychology; these prove that beliefs similar to those found in the Bible about God arise among all peoples at a certain stage of mental and social development, and pass through a process of evolution which is entirely conditioned by the development of the other elements in their civilization. ~ Mordecai Menahem Kaplan,#NFDB
1217:We’ve discussed two parallel adaptations to manage the sun’s dueling effects on body chemistry—the evolution of dark skin to protect our stores of folate and the evolution of a genetic trigger for increased cholesterol to maximize production of vitamin D. Both of those adaptations are common in people of African descent and are effective—in the bright, strong sun of equatorial Africa. But what happens when people with those adaptations move to New England, where the sun is much less plentiful and far less strong? Without enough sunlight to penetrate their dark skin and convert the additional cholesterol, they’re doubly vulnerable—not enough vitamin D and too much cholesterol. Sure enough, rickets—the disease caused by a vitamin D deficiency that causes poor bone growth in children—was very common in African American populations until we started routinely fortifying milk with vitamin D in the last century. And there appear to be connections among sunlight, vitamin D, and prostate cancer in African Americans as well. There is growing evidence that vitamin D inhibits the growth of cancerous cells in the prostate and in other areas, including the colon, too. Epidemiologists, who specialize in unlocking the mystery of where, why, and in whom disease occurs, have found that the risk of prostate cancer for black men in America climbs from south to north. When it comes to prostate cancer in black men, the risk is considerably lower in sunny Florida. But as you move north, the rate of prostate cancer in black men climbs until it peaks in the often cloud-covered heights of the Northeast. ~ Sharon Moalem, #NFDB
1218:One of the great divides, I think, between people who date a lot and people who date never is that people who date never don’t understand putting up with “fine.” I can’t begin to conceive of why anybody would voluntarily spend great chunks of her free time dedicated to someone she doesn’t adore, because I never do that. My dater friends, on the other hand, do this all the time. I know this because I’m the one they meet up with after, and I’m the one who has to try to understand why my otherwise brilliant friends keep hanging out with people about whom they only have bad (or very, very mediocre) things to say. A person who has spent her life planning her free time based only on herself, and the friends she knows she loves, can’t understand this. Why would I want to go out to dinner and a movie with someone I’m not completely crazy about when I already know how much I like eating dinner and watching a movie by myself, or with Rylee? Getting someone else involved means I have to put on a nicer outfit and stress out about the way I look chewing my food. If I’m going to have to consider my chewing face, I only want to do it for someone I think I might be able to really like. I know that might make it harder for me. I know there is a possibility—a very little one, though, that I have a hard time really believing in—that chemistry can grow where there wasn’t any to begin with. I know that if I don’t put myself out there, I won’t just answer my door someday to find my perfect spouse waiting on the other side of the stoop. AND I know that if that did happen, I should probably call the police. ~ Katie Heaney, #NFDB
1219:You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.
--After all, Haines began ...
Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.
--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.
--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.
--Italian? Haines said.
A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.
--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.
--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: ET UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM ET APOSTOLICAM ECCLESIAM: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. ~ James Joyce,#NFDB
1220:The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
1221:The aim of the next nine sections will be to present careful arguments to show that none of the loopholes (a), (b), and (c) can provide a plausible way to evade the contradiction of the robot. Accordingly, it, and we also, are driven to the unpalatable (d), if we are still insistent that mathematical understanding can be reduced to computation. I am sure that those concerned with artificial intelligence would find (d) to be as unpalatable as I find it to be. It provides perhaps a conceivable standpoint-essentially the A/D suggestion, referred to at the end of 1.3, whereby divine intervention is required for the implanting of an unknowable algorithm into each of our computer brains (by 'the best programmer in the business'). In any case, the conclusion 'unknowable'-for the very mechanisms that are ultimately responsible for our intelligence-would not be a very happy conclusion for those hoping actually to construct a genuinely artificially intelligent robot! It would not be a particularly happy conclusion, either, for those of us who hope to understand, in principle and in a scientific way, how human intelligence has actually arisen, in accordance with comprehensible scientific laws, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and natural selection-irrespective of any desire to reproduce such intelligence in a robot device. In my own opinion, such a pessimistic conclusion is not warranted, for the very reason that 'scientific comprehensibility' is a very different thing from 'computability'. The conclusion should be not that the underlying laws are incomprehensible, but that they are non-computable. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
1222:Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1223:Brittany Ellis," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the table behind Colin. I unenthusiastically sit on the stool at my assigned place.
"Alejandro Fuentes," Mrs. Peterson says, pointing to the stool next to me.
Oh my God. Alex . . . my chemistry partner? For my entire senior year! No way, no how, SO not okay. I give Colin a "help me" look as I try to avoid a panic attack. I definitely should have stayed at home. In bed. Under the covers. Forget not being intimidated.
"Call me Alex."
Mrs. Peterson looks up from her class list and regards Alex above the glasses on her nose. ' Alex Fuentes," she says, before changing his name on her list. "Mr. Fuentes, take off that bandanna. I have a zero tolerance policy in my class. No gang-related accessories are allowed to enter this room. Unfortunately, Alex, your reputation precedes you. Dr. Aguirre backs my zero tolerance policy one hundred percent ... do I make myself clear?"
Alex stares her down before sliding the bandanna off his head, exposing raven hair that matches his eyes.
"It's to cover up the lice," Colin mutters to Darlene, but I hear him and Alex does, too.
"Vete a la verga," Alex says to Colin, his hard eyes blazing. "Collate el hocico."
"Whatever, dude," Colin says, then turns around. "He can't even speak English."
"That's enough, Colin. Alex, sit down." Mrs. Peterson eyes the rest of the class. "That goes for the rest of you, as well. I can't control what you do outside of this room, but in my class I'm the boss." She turns back to Alex. "Do I make myself clear?"
"Si, señora," Alex says, deliberately slow. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1224:Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn't be falling out.
Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm a walking cliché.
I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There's something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I'm way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat I would be happier. I wouldn't have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that's fooling anyone. Fat ass.
I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.
I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that?
Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted to? Men don't have to be attractive. But that's not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days.
Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that's what's wrong with me. Bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that.
But I'll still be ugly though.
Nothing's gonna change that. ~ Charlie Kaufman,#NFDB
1225:But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?
The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life?
The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two. ~ Erwin Panofsky,#NFDB
1226:What does a playoff team look like?.., It looks like this... A playoff team is tired. They're in pain from a long season. They're frustrated about losses. But they're full of passion. Passion that will let them overcome the fatigue and the pain... A playoff team has to have energy. They have to be prepared to do whatever it takes. to battle one-on-one late in the 3rd period. To block shots. To play 2 or 3 overtime periods, i that's what it takes to win. They have to be the 1st to the puck, Clear the net. For the next 2 months, a playoff team has to bring that energy to the arena every night... It's not just the passion and the energy. It's not just physical conditioning. It's mental conditioning too. You have to stick to the game plan. You can't let fatigue or distractions get in the way of how you play. Some of you men have never been in a playoff game. Everyone will tell you it's a whole new season. Everyone will tell you it's intense. You have no. Fucking. Idea... All of you have trained yourself to leave everything behind when you step on the ice. And that's what you have to do now... You have to make the mind shift that this is a new season. The only that matters now is what we can control -- being ready for the next game... You have to have confidence in yourself. And n your teammates... Some of you guys haven't been playing together that long. But I've seen the teamwork you all bring. The work ethic. I've seen the relationships and the chemistry develop. You have to have trust in each other... and that means being trustworthy. Being there for each other. For the team... coaching staff. Trust in the game plan. Trust in the preparation... I ave trust in you. We can do this. ~ Kelly Jamieson, #NFDB
1227:A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter. A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder.9 The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same chemical and behavioural effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.10 High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. Serotonin and octopamine also regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backwards when it needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster. You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1228:A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter. A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder.9 The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same chemical and behavioural effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.10 High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. Serotonin and octopamine also regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backwards when it needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster. You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1229:I seriously don’t give a crap how I get the pants; just that I get ‘em before my next class. A wet crotch is not the way to show Brittany I’m a stud.
I wait at the tree while other kids throw away their lunches and head back inside. Before I know it, music starts playing through the loudspeakers and Paco is nowhere in sight. Great. Now I have five minutes to get to Peterson’s class. Gritting my teeth, I walk to chemistry with my books strategically placed in front of my crotch, with two minutes to spare. I slide onto the stool and push it as close to the lab table as possible, hiding the stain.
Brittany walks into the room, her sunshine hair falling down the front of her chest, ending in perfect little curls that bounce when she walks. Instead of that perfection turning me on, it makes me want to mess it all up.
I wink at her when she glances at me. She huffs and pulls her stool as far away from me as possible.
Remembering Mrs. Peterson’s zero-tolerance rule, I pull my bandana off and place it in my lap directly over the stain. Then I turn to the pom-pom chick sitting next to me. “You’re gonna have to talk to me at some point.”
“So your girlfriend can have a reason to beat me up? No thanks, Alex. I’d rather keep my face the way it is.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend. You want to interview for the position?” I scan her from top to bottom, focusing on the parts she relies on so heavily.
She curls her pink-frosted top lip and sneers at me. “Not on your life.”
“Mujer, you wouldn’t know what to do with all this testosterone if you had it in your hands.”
That’s it, Alex. Tease her into wanting you. She’ll take the bait.
She turns away from me. “You’re disgusting.”
“What if I said we’d make a great couple?”
“I’d say you were an idiot. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1230:I'm glad this happened," he said softly.
I hoped it was for real,and I didn't want to talk about it too much and ruin the lovely illusion that we were a couple.
So I said noncommittally, "Me too."
"Because I've been trying to get you back since the seventh grade."
I must have given him a very skeptical look.
He laughed at my expression. "Yeah, I have a funny way of showing it. I know. But you're always on my mind. You're in the front of my mind,on the tip of my tongue. So if someone breaks a beaker in chemistry class, I raise my hand and tell Ms. Abernathy you did it. If somebody brings a copy of Playboy to class, I stuff it in your locker."
"Oh!" I thought back to the January issue. "I wondered where that came from."
"And if Everett Walsh tells the lunch table what a wicked kisser you are and how far he would have gotten with you if his mother hadn't come in-"
I stamped my foot on the floorboard of the SUV."That is so not true! He'd already gotten as far as he was going. He's not that cute, and I had to go home and study for algebra.
"-It drives me insane to the point that I tell him to shut up or I'll make him shut up right there in front of everybody. Because I am supposed to be your boyfriend, and my mother is supposed to hate you,and you're supposed to be making out with me."
Twisted as this declaration was,it was the sweetest thing a boy had ever said to me.I dwelled on the soft lips that had formed the statement,and on the meaning of his words. "Okay." I scooted across the seat and nibbled the very edge of his superhero chin.
"Ah," he gasped, moving both hands from the steering wheel to the seat to brace himself. "I didn't mean now.I meant in general.Your dad will come out of the house and kill me. ~ Jennifer Echols,#NFDB
1231:Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo is speaking about occult endeavour here and says that those who don't have the capacity must wait till it is given to them. Can't they get it through practice?
No. That is, if it is latent in someone, it can be developed by practice. But if one doesn't have occult power, he may try for fifty years, he won't get anywhere. Everybody cannot have occult power. It is as though you were asking whether everybody could be a musician, everybody could be a painter, everybody could... Some can, some can't. It is a question of temperament.
What is the difference between occultism and mysticism?
They are not at all the same thing.
Mysticism is a more or less emotive relation with what one senses to be a divine power - that kind of highly emotional, affective, very intense relation with something invisible which is or is taken for the Divine. That is mysticism.
Occultism is exactly what he has said: it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as the knowledge of chemistry for material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces, their different vibrations, their interrelations, the combinations which can be made by bringing them together and the power one can exercise over them. It is absolutely scientific; and it ought to be learnt like a science; that is, one cannot practise occultism as something emotional or something vague and imprecise. You must work at it as you would do at chemistry, and learn all the rules or find them if there is nobody to teach you. But it is at some risk to yourself that you can find them. There are combinations here as explosive as certain chemical combinations. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#NFDB
1232:I have that old sinking feeling. I've been overly available, sickeningly sweet and forever enabling all in the name of being 'liked.' I've compromised myself. I've suffered fools, idiots and dullards. I've gone on far too many dates with men because I felt guilty that they liked me more than I liked them. I've fallen deeply and madly I'm love with men I've never met just because I thought they looked 'deep.' I've built whole futures with men I hardly knew; I've planned weddings and named invisible children based on a side glance. I've made chemistry where there was none. I've forced intimacy while building higher Walls. I've been alone in a two year relationship. I've faked more orgasms than I can count while being comfortable with no affection at all.
I realise I have to make a decision right here and now. Do I go back to the sliver of a person I was before or do I, despite whatever bullshit happened tonight, hold on to this... This authenticity? If I go back to the the way I was before tonight, I'll have to compromise myself, follow rules with men who have none, hold my tongue, be quiet and laugh at shitty jokes. I have to never be challenged, yet be called challenging when I have an opinion or, really, speak at all. I'll never be torched by someone and get goosebumps again. I'll never be outside of myself. I'll never let go. I'll never lose myself. I'll never know what real love is - both for someone else and for me. I'll look back on this life and wish I could do it all over again. I finally see the consequences of that life. The path more travelled only led to someone else's life: an idealised, saturated world of White picket fences and gingham tablecloths. A life where the real me is locked away. Sure i had a plus-one but at what price? No. No matter how awkward and painful this gets, I can't go back. ~ Liza Palmer,#NFDB
1233:Well, Melinda, you little devil,” John said, grinning. She rested the back of her hand over her eyes while John and Jack studied the ultrasound, examining that little heartbeat in a barely moving mass. John pointed out small buds where arms and legs would be growing. “When was your last period?” John asked her. She took the hand off her eyes and glared at her husband. “Um, she hasn’t exactly ever had one.” “Huh?” John said. “That I know of,” Jack said with a shrug. “A year and a half ago, all right?” she said crisply. “Approximately. I’ve been nursing. I’ve been pregnant. I’ve been cast into hell and will live out my days with sore boobs and fat ankles.” “Whew. Going right for the mood swings, huh? Okay, looks like about eight weeks to me. That’s an educated guess. I’m thinking mid to late May. How does that sound?” “Oh, duckie,” she answered. “You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Jack said. “She was counting on still being infertile. This might cause her to finally give up that illusion.” “I told you if you made one joke—” “Melinda,” Jack said, his expression stern, “I was not joking.” “I would just like to know how this is possible!” she ranted. “David is like a miracle pregnancy, and before I even get him off the breast, I’ve got another one cooking.” “Ever hear the saying, pregnancy cures infertility?” John asked her. “Yes!” she said, disgusted. “You know what I’m talking about—probably better than me. I guess you didn’t think it would apply to you, huh?” “What are you talking about?” Jack asked John. “A lot of conditions that cause infertility are made better by pregnancy—endometriosis being one. Often when you finally score that first miraculous conception, the rest follow more easily. And when you change partners, you change chemistry. You’re going to want to keep these things in mind,” he said. And he grinned. ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1234:Need directions or your car fixed.”
“None of the above,” I say.
“Trick-or-treatin’ on my side of town?”
“No.”
“It’s over, mujer. ¿Me oyes? Why do you keep droppin’ into my life and fuckin’ with my head? Besides, aren’t you supposed to be at the Halloween dance with some college guy?”
“I blew him off. Can we talk?”
“Listen, I’ve got a shitload of work that still needs to get done. What did you come here for? And where’s Enrique?”
“He, uh, left,” I say nervously. “I think I scared him away.”
“You? I don’t think so.”
“I showed him what I was wearing under my coat.”
Alex’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Let me in before I freeze out here. Please.” I look behind me. The darkness seems inviting right now as my blood pumps harder. Pulling the coat tighter around me, my skin puckers with goose bumps. I shiver.
Sighing, he leads me into the body shop and locks the door. There’s a space heater in the middle of the shop, thank goodness. I stand by it and rub my hands together.
“Listen, truth is I’m glad you’re here. But didn’t we break up?”
“I want to give us another try. Pretending we’re just chemistry partners in class has been torture. I miss you. Don’t you miss me?”
He looks skeptical. His head is cocked to the side, as if he’s not quite sure he’s hearing correctly. “You know I’m still in the Blood.”
“I know. I’ll take whatever you can give me, Alex.”
“I’ll never be able to meet your expectations.”
“What if I tell you I won’t have any expectations?”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. I can tell he’s thinking hard about this, because his expression turns serious. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “You keep me company while I finish my dinner. I won’t even ask you what you have…or don’t have…under that coat. Deal?”
I smile tentatively and smooth down my hair. “Deal. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1235:During chemistry, it’s another experiment/observation. Alex swirls test tubes full of silver nitrate and potassium chloride liquids. “Looks like they’re both water to me, Mrs. P.,” Alex says.
“Looks are deceiving,” Mrs. Peterson replies.
My gaze travels to Alex’s hands. Those hands that are now busy measuring the right amount of silver nitrate and potassium chloride are the same ones that traced my lips intimately.
“Earth to Brittany.”
I blink my eyes, snapping out of my daydream. Alex is holding a test tube full of clear liquid out to me.
Which reminds me I should help him pour the liquids together. “Uh, sorry.” I pick up one test tube and pour it into the tube he’s holding.
“We’re supposed to write down what happens,” he says, using the stirring rod to mix the chemicals together.
A white solid magically appears inside the clear liquid.
“Hey, Mrs. P.! I think we found the answer to our problems for the ozone layer depletion,” Alex teases.
Mrs. Peterson shakes her head.
“So what do we observe in the tube?” he asks me, reading off of the sheet Mrs. Peterson handed out at the start of class. “I’d say the watery liquid is probably potassium nitrate now and the white solid mass in silver chloride. What’s your assumption?”
As he hands me the tube, our fingers brush against each other. And linger. It leaves a tingling sensation I can’t ignore.
I glance up. Our eyes meet, and for a minute I think he’s trying to send me a private message but his expression turns dark and he looks away.
“What do you want me to do?” I whisper.
“You’re gonna have to figure that one out yourself.”
“Alex…”
But he won’t tell me what to do. I guess I’m a bitch to even ask him for advice when he can’t possibly be unbiased.
When I’m close to Alex I feel excitement, the way I used to feel on Christmas morning. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1236:Identity
1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:
an order of instinct prevails
through all accidents of circumstance,
though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
webs:
you can go all
around the fringing attachments
and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
numerous occasions of accident:
2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:
how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in a particular place?
how and to what extent
and by what modes of chemistry
and control?
it is
wonderful
how things work: I will tell you
about it
because
it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
28
and stars and spider webs
and known
is loved:
in that love,
each of us knowing it,
I love you,
for it moves within and beyond us,
sizzles in
to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees
by summer windowsills:
I will show you
the underlying that takes no image to itself,
cannot be shown or said,
but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds,
is all and
beyond destruction
because created fully in no
particular form:
if the web were perfectly pre-set,
the spider could
never find
a perfect place to set it in: and
if the web were
perfectly adaptable,
if freedom and possibility were without limit,
the web would
lose its special identity:
the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (intersecting that the freest
'medium' should
accept the firmest order)
and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
29
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy.
~ Archie Randolph Ammons,#NFDB
1237:Dr. Mary Atwater's story was so inspiring. Growing up, Dr. Atwater had a dream to one day be a teacher. But as a black person in the American South during the 1950s, she didn't have many great educational opportunities. It didn't help that she was also a girl, and a girl who loved science, since many believed that science was a subject only for men. Well, like me, she didn't listen to what others said. And also like me, Dr. Atwater had a father, Mr. John C. Monroe, who believed in her dreams and saved money to send her and her siblings to college. She eventually got a PhD in science education with a concentration in chemistry. She was an associate director at New Mexico State University and then taught physical science and chemistry at Fayetteville State University. She later joined the University of Georgia, where she still works as a science education researcher. Along the way, she began writing science books, never knowing that, many years down the road, one of those books would end up in Wimbe, Malawi, and change my life forever.
I'd informed Dr. Atwater that the copy of Using Energy I'd borrowed so many times had been stolen (probably by another student hoping to get the same magic), so that day in Washington, she presented me with my own copy, along with the teacher's edition and a special notebook to record my experiments.
"Your story confirms my belief in human beings and their abilities to make the world a better place by using science," she told me. "I'm happy that I lived long enough to see that something I wrote could change someone's life. I'm glad I found you."
And for sure, I'm also happy to have found Dr. Atwater. ~ William Kamkwamba,#NFDB
1238:To analyse the classes of life we have to consider two very different kinds of phenomena: the one embraced under the collective name-Inorganic chemistry-the other under the collective nameOrganic chemistry, or the chemistry of hydro-carbons. These divisions are made because of the peculiar properties of the elements chiefly involved in the second class. The properties of matter are so distributed among the elements that three of them- Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon-possess an ensemble of unique characteristics. The number of reactions in inorganic chemistry are relatively few, but in organic chemistry-in the chemistry of these three elements the number of different compounds is practically unlimited. Up to 1910, we knew of more than 79 elements of which the whole number of reactions amounted to only a few hundreds, but among the remaining three elements-Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen-the reactions were known to be practically unlimited in number and possibilities; this fact must have very far reaching consequences. As far as energies are concerned, we have to take them as nature reveals them to us. Here more than ever, mathematical thinking is essential and will help enormously. The reactions in inorganic chemistry always involve the phenomenon of heat, sometimes light, and in some instances an unusual energy is produced called electricity. Until now, the radioactive elements represent a group too insufficiently known for an enlargement here upon this subject.
The organic compounds being unlimited in number and possibilities and with their unique characteristics, represent of course, a different class of phenomena, but being, at the same time, chemical they include the basic chemical phenomena involved in all chemical reactions, but being unique in many other respects, they also have an infinitely vast field of unique characteristics. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 53,#NFDB
1239:Adrian looked over at me again. “Who knows more about male weakness: you or me?”
“Go on.” I refused to directly answer the question.
“Get a new dress. One that shows a lot of skin. Short. Strapless. Maybe a push-up bra too.” He actually had the audacity to do a quick assessment of my chest. “Eh, maybe not. But definitely some high heels.”
“Adrian,” I exclaimed. “You’ve seen how Alchemists dress. Do you think I can really wear something like that?”
He was unconcerned. “You’ll make it work. You’ll change clothes or something. But I’m telling you, if you want to get a guy to do something that might be difficult, then the best way is to distract him so that he can’t devote his full brainpower to the consequences.”
“You don’t have a lot of faith in your own gender.”
“Hey, I’m telling you the truth. I’ve been distracted by sexy dresses a lot.”
I didn’t really know if that was a valid argument, seeing as Adrian was distracted by a lot of things. Fondue. T-shirts. Kittens. “And so, what then? I show some skin, and the world is mine?”
“That’ll help.” Amazingly, I could tell he was dead serious. “And you’ve gotta act confident the whole time, like it’s already a done deal. Then make sure when you’re actually asking for what you want that you tell him you’d be ‘so, so grateful.’ But don’t elaborate. His imagination will do half the work for you. ”
I shook my head, glad we’d almost reached our destination. I didn’t know how much more I could listen to. “This is the most ridiculous advice I’ve ever heard. It’s also kind of sexist too, but I can’t decide who it offends more, men or women.”
“Look, Sage. I don’t know much about chemistry or computer hacking or photosynthery, but this is something I’ve got a lot of experience with.” I think he meant photosynthesis, but I didn’t correct him. “Use my knowledge. Don’t let it go to waste. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
1240:Also by Alan Watts The Spirit of Zen (1936) The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937) The Meaning of Happiness (1940) The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (1944) (translation) Behold the Spirit (1948) Easter: Its Story and Meaning (1950) The Supreme Identity (1950) The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953) The Way of Zen (1957) Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) “This Is It” and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960) Psychotherapy East and West (1961) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963) Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (1964) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) Nonsense (1967) Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality (1970) Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak (1971) The Art of Contemplation (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (1972) Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (1973) Posthumous Publications Tao: The Watercourse Way (unfinished at the time of his death in 1973, published in 1975) The Essence of Alan Watts (1974) Essential Alan Watts (1976) Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life (1978) Om: Creative Meditations (1979) Play to Live (1982) Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self (1983) Out of the Trap (1985) Diamond Web (1986) The Early Writings of Alan Watts (1987) The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings (1990) Talking Zen (1994) Become Who You Are (1995) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (1995) The Philosophies of Asia (1995) The Tao of Philosophy (1995) Myth and Religion (1996) Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking (1997) Zen and the Beat Way (1997) Culture of Counterculture (1998) Eastern Wisdom: What Is Zen?, What Is Tao?, An Introduction to Meditation (2000) Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960–1969 (2006) ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1241:The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
All that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.
There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve their purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand! ~ John Cowper Powys,#NFDB
1242:I open the box, and there are notes. Notes and notes and notes. Peter’s notes. Peter’s notes I threw away.
“I found them when I was emptying your trash,” she says. Hastily she adds, “I only read a couple. And then I saved them because I could tell they were important.”
I touch one that Peter folded into an airplane. “Kitty…you know Peter and I aren’t getting back together, right?”
Kitty grabs the bowl of popcorn and says, “Just read them.” Then she goes into the living room and turns on the TV.
I close the hatbox and take it with me upstairs. When I am in my room, I sit on the floor and spread them out around me.
A lot of the notes just say things like “Meet you at your locker after school” and Can I borrow your chemistry notes from yesterday?” I find the spiderweb one from Halloween, and it makes me smile. Another one says, “Can you take the bus home today? I want to surprise Kitty and pick her up from school so she can show me and my car off to her friends.” “Thanks for coming to the estate sale with me this weekend. You made the day fun. I owe you one.” “Don’t forget to pack a Korean yogurt for me!” “If you make Josh’s dumb white-chocolate cranberry cookies and not my fruitcake ones, it’s over.” I laugh out loud. And then, the one I read over and over: “You look pretty today. I like you in blue.”
I’ve never gotten a love letter before. But reading these notes like this, one after the other, it feels like I have. It’s like…it’s like there’s only ever been Peter. Like everyone else that came before him, they were all to prepare me for this. I think I see the difference now, between loving someone from afar and loving someone up close. When you see them up close, you see the real them, but they also get to see the real you. And Peter does. He sees me, and I see him.
Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That’s part of the risk. I don’t want to be scared anymore. I want to be brave, like Margot. It’s almost a new year, after all. ~ Jenny Han,#NFDB
1243:Here’s an example: DNA stores information very nicely, in a durable format that allows for exact duplication. A ribosome turns that stored information into a sequence of amino acids, a protein, which folds up into a variety of chemically active shapes. The combined system, DNA and ribosome, can build all sorts of protein machinery. But what good is DNA, without a ribosome that turns DNA information into proteins? What good is a ribosome, without DNA to tell it which proteins to make? Organisms don’t always leave fossils, and evolutionary biology can’t always figure out the incremental pathway. But in this case we do know how it happened. RNA shares with DNA the property of being able to carry information and replicate itself, although RNA is less durable and copies less accurately. And RNA also shares the ability of proteins to fold up into chemically active shapes, though it’s not as versatile as the amino acid chains of proteins. Almost certainly, RNA is the single A which predates the mutually dependent A* and B. It’s just as important to note that RNA does the combined job of DNA and proteins poorly, as that it does the combined job at all. It’s amazing enough that a single molecule can both store information and manipulate chemistry. For it to do the job well would be a wholly unnecessary miracle. What was the very first replicator ever to exist? It may well have been an RNA strand, because by some strange coincidence, the chemical ingredients of RNA are chemicals that would have arisen naturally on the prebiotic Earth of 4 billion years ago. Please note: evolution does not explain the origin of life; evolutionary biology is not supposed to explain the first replicator, because the first replicator does not come from another replicator. Evolution describes statistical trends in replication. The first replicator wasn’t a statistical trend, it was a pure accident. The notion that evolution should explain the origin of life is a pure strawman—more creationist misrepresentation. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
1244:Where’s my cell phone?” I ask. “And please put a shirt on.”
He reaches down and grabs my phone off the floor. “Why?”
“The reason I need my cell,” I say as I take it from him, “is to call a cab and the reason I want you to put a shirt on is, well, because, um…”
“You’ve never seen a guy with his shirt off?”
“Ha, ha. Very funny. Believe me, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”
“Wanna bet?” he says, then moves his hands to the button on his jeans and pops it open.
Isabel walks in at that exact moment. “Whoa, Alex. Please keep your pants on.”
When she looks over at me I put my hands up. “Don’t look at me. I was just about to call a cab when he--”
Shaking her head while Alex buttons back up, she walks to her purse and picks up a set of keys. “Forget the cab. I’ll drive you home.”
“I’ll drive her,” Alex cuts in.
Isabel seems exhausted dealing with us, similar to how Mrs. Peterson looks during chemistry class. “Would you rather me drive you, or Alex?” she asks.
I have a boyfriend. Okay, so I admit every time I catch Alex looking at me a warmth spreads through my body. But it’s normal. We’re two teenagers with obvious sexual tension passing between us. As long as I never act on it, everything will be just fine.
Because if I ever did act on it, the consequences would be disastrous. I’d lose Colin. I’d lose my friends. I’d lose the control I have over my life.
Most of all, I’d lose what’s left of my mother’s love.
If I’m not seen as perfect, what happened yesterday with my mom would seem tame. Being perfect to the outside world equates to how my mom treats me. If any of her country club friends see me out with Alex, my mom might as well be an outcast too. If she’s shunned by her friends, I’ll be shunned by her. I can’t take that chance. This is as real as I can afford to get.
“Isabel, take me home,” I say, then look at Alex.
He gives a small shake of his head, grabs his shirt and keys, and storms out the front door without another word. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1245:All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments! If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
1246:Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.
I explored it all.
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.
Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.
All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first. ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
1247:Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology. ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
1248:READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology. ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
1249:Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?"
Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious.
"Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined."
"But surely there's something more to it than that."
"It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once."
De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?"
The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next.
"Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-"
"No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling."
De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise.
"Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'"
The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.
He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do. ~ Michael Robotham,#NFDB
1250:You only like white guys?”
“Stop that,” I say through gritted teeth.
“What?” he says, getting all serious. “It’s the truth, ain’t it?”
Mrs. Peterson appears in front of us. “How’s that outline coming along?” she asks.
I put on a fake smile. “Peachy.” I pull out the research I did at home and get down to business while Mrs. Peterson watches. “I did some research on the hand warmers last night. We need to dissolve sixty grams of sodium acetate and one hundred millimeters of water at seventy degrees.”
“Wrong,” Alex says.
I look up and realize Mrs. Peterson is gone. “Excuse me?”
Alex folds his arms across his chest. “You’re wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think you’ve never been wrong before?”
He says it as if I’m a ditzy blond bimbo, which sets my blood to way past boiling. “Sure I have,” I say. I make my voice sound high and breathless, like a Southern debutante. “Why, just last week I bought Bobbi Brown Sandwash Petal lip gloss when the Pink Blossom color would have looked so much better with my complexion. Needless to say the purchase was a total disaster,” I say. He expected to hear something like that come out of my mouth. I wonder if he believes it, or from my tone realizes I’m being sarcastic.
“I’ll bet,” he says.
“Haven’t you ever been wrong before?” I ask him.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Last week, when I robbed that bank over by the Walgreens, I told the teller to hand over all the fifties he had in the till. What I really should have asked for was the twenties ‘cause there were way more twenties than fifties.”
Okay, so he did get that I was putting on an act. And gave it right back to me with his own ridiculous scenario, which is actually unsettling because it makes us similar in some twisted way. I put a hand on my chest and gasp, playing along. “What a disaster.”
“So I guess we can both be wrong.”
I stick my chin in the air and declare stubbornly, “Well, I’m not wrong about chemistry. Unlike you, I take this class seriously.”
“Let’s have a bet, then. If I’m right, you kiss me,” he says.
“And if I’m right?”
“Name it.”
It’s like taking candy from a baby. Mr. Macho Guy’s ego is about to be taken down a notch, and I’m all too happy to be the one to do it. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1251:If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.
The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#NFDB
1252:That’s What the Dead Do
That’s what
the dead do.
The ones
who’ve died,
who’ve given up
their lives,
who’ve died for us
so that they say
to us
see here this is
all it means
to be dead —
to be no longer living and
to be both never
and always as never before
and after.
This is all
it means
the dead ones say,
So you die,
and everyone left living
sticks around.
You and everyone
who loves you
and whom you love
take some time
to mourn
with speechless desire,
and unspoken awe,
our long faces and
our sideways glances
(as if you might be
somewhere off
to the side),
here we come
with our living
fruit baskets and
soon to wilt white flowers,
good things
intended
to sublimate pain
to substitute one thing for another
& others pay
their respects
& others have their curiosity piqued
& a very few are glad you’re gone
though would never dare
say so
& most of all most
can’t care at all
and rightly so, everyone
can’t be this faced
with this much
that often
& that’s what
a death does
beyond doubt
one death says
what every death is,
& what’s out of sight
just over the horizon
not so long later,
a year or so
at most,
every one’s up & gone
on to other matters
the kinds of matters
that matter to the living
(your matter’s been burned
or by nature’s
routine chemistry
mostly dissolved) (but you
knew that)
(you knew all along)
finding reasons
to stay alive
finding work first
for fuel
& then for pleasure
& sex &
maybe love
or what passes
for love
& sex
maybe for adding
another
living human into the mix
for the rest of us
that’re left
& other ways
to pass the time.
Once thoughts
about how many of us
there are
involved
in so much
doing and coming
& going & searching
& hunting & gathering
& using up time
& space
& materials. ~ Dara Wier,#NFDB
1253:Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an
untrustworthy person-a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief-you may begin to feel less trust worthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample
evidence that animals-rats and monkeys, for example-that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains.
And-what is especially relevant here-they avoid fighting even in self-defense.
Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme
subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our
religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth.
It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may
truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a
halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition.
Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich,#NFDB
1254:But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh? ~ Jack London, #NFDB
1255:She could feel Cameron move up behind her; the warmth of his body was right there, though he didn’t touch her. Then one hand caressed her upper arm while the other pulled her hair away from her ear. “This is the first time I’ve ever driven two hundred miles to see a woman I’ve barely met, Vanessa,” he whispered. Vanni bit on her lower lip. She’d been sleepless last night, thinking. She knew Cameron was interested in her, but that wasn’t enough. Her mind was on Paul. She turned around. “I’m very vulnerable, Cameron,” she said by way of warning. “I know. I’ll treat you carefully.” “You’re going to have to treat me patiently,” she said. “I’m not prepared to be any more than friends right now.” He laughed and shook his head. “I’d sure like to see where this could go.” “Friends,” she said. “Or nothing at all.” He cocked his head and smiled. “Do friends kiss? Just to see if there’s…chemistry?” She shook her head. “They do not. Not yet.” “Yet is a much more encouraging response than nothing at all. I guess friends kiss when they’ve gotten to know each other and there’s trust. Do I have that right?” She sighed deeply. If not for Paul, she might be attracted to Cameron. He was handsome, sexy, sweet. “It’s too soon. My mother-in-law jumped the gun, introducing us and—” “Nah, it’s not Carol’s fault. I’m jumping the gun because…” He shrugged. “Because you’re beautiful and fun. So shoot me.” She smiled at him. “I don’t think your life is in danger for calling me beautiful and fun. That’s very nice. But I’m not getting involved with you right now.” “You said we’d be friends,” he argued. And he reached out to stroke her hair. “Behave like a friend, Cameron. Like a Boy Scout.” He laughed at her. “You’re asking way too much. I’ll behave, but let’s keep this in perspective. I’m a man. You’re a damn sexy woman.” “Do I have to worry you won’t mind your manners?” she asked, lifting a brow. “Absolutely not,” he promised. “You’re in charge.” “Then no touching until… No touching.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Whatever you want, Vanessa. I’m just going to—” At that very moment, Plenty whinnied, backed away from the stream and bolted. “Shoot!” Vanni said. “That little troublemaker.” She pushed Cameron away, grabbed the reins of the gelding, leaped into the saddle and said, “I’ll be back.” She directed her horse after Plenty. “Don’t go away,” she yelled, laughing, as if he could go anywhere, stranded as he was. ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1256:Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology.
However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead.
The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted. ~ Patricia Fara,#NFDB
1257:Face the facts. Your life is too perfect. You probably lie awake at night, fantasizing about spicin’ up all that lily whiteness you live in.” But damn it, I get a whiff of vanilla from her perfume or lotion. It reminds me of cookies. I love cookies, so this is not good at all. “Gettin’ near the fire, chica, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get burned.”
“You touch her and you’ll regret it, Fuentes,” Colin’s voice rings out. He resembles a burro, with his big white teeth and ears sticking out from his buzz cut. “Get the hell away from her.”
“Colin,” Brittany says. “It’s okay. I can handle this.”
Burro Face brought reinforcements: three other pasty white dudes, standing behind him for backup. I size up Burro Face and his friends to see if I can take them all on, and decide I could give all four a run for their money. “When you’re strong enough to play in the big leagues, jock boy, then I’ll listen to the mierda flyin’ out of your mouth,” I say.
Other students are gathering around us, leaving room for a fight that is sure to be fast, furious, and bloody. Little do they know Burro Face is a runner. This time he’s got backup, though, so maybe he’ll stay to duke it out. I’m always prepared for a fight, been in more of ‘em than I can count on my fingers and toes. I’ve got the scars to prove it.
“Colin, he’s not worth it,” Brittany says.
Thanks, mamacita. Right back at ya.
“You threatening me, Fuentes?” Colin barks, ignoring his girlfriend.
“No, asshole,” I say, staring him down. “Little dicks like you make threats.”
Brittany parks her body in front of Colin and puts her hand on his chest. “Don’t listen to him,” she says.
“I’m not afraid of you. My dad’s a lawyer,” Colin brags, then puts his arm around Brittany. “She’s mine. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Then keep a leash on her,” I advise. “Or she might be tempted to find a new owner.”
My friend Paco comes up beside me. “Andas bien, Alex?”
“Yeah, Paco,” I tell him, then watch as two teachers walk down the hall escorted by a guy in a police uniform. This is what Adams wants, perfectly planned to get my ass kicked out of school. I’m not falling into his trap only to end up on Aguirre’s hit list. “Si, everything’s bien.” I turn to Brittany. “Catch ya later, mamacita. I’m looking forward to researching our chemistry.”
Before I leave and save myself from suspension on top of my detention, Brittany sticks that perky nose of hers in the air as if I’m the scum of the earth. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1258:we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future. ~ Grace Lee Boggs, #NFDB
1259:Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.
Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)...
Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells.
According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,#NFDB
1260:All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”
At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.
“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.”
“Yeah but Maestra—”
“Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”
“But what about self-esteem?”
“Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory. ~ Tom Robbins,#NFDB
1261:I do not understand,”said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, in the Mason’s arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him. “I don’t understand,”he said, “how it is that the mind of man cannot attain the knowledge of which you speak.”The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile. “The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to imbibe,”he said. “Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”“Yes, yes, that is so,”said Pierre joyfully. “The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. To receive that science it is necessary to purify and renew one’s inner self, and so before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one’s self. And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that God has implanted in our souls.”“Yes, yes,”assented Pierre. “Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask thyself whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained relying on reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, you are clever, you are well educated. And what have you done with all these good gifts? Are you content with yourself and with your life?”“No, I hate my life,”Pierre muttered, wincing. “Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art purified, thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir. How have you spent it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself responsibility for the guidance of a young woman; and what have you done? You have not helped her to find the way of truth, my dear sir, but have thrust her into an abyss of deceit and misery. A man offended you and you shot him, and you say you do not know God and hate your life. There is nothing strange in that, my dear sir! ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1262:All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability. On some of the billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, life may never arise. On others, it may arise and die out, or never evolve beyond its simplest forms. And on some small fraction of worlds there may develop intelligences and civilizations more advanced than our own. Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life—moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. All life on Earth is closely related. We have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. As a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. They study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. Is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? Or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the Galaxy? Let ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1263:That was the whole trouble with police work. You come plunging in. a jagged Stone Age knife, to probe the delicate tissues of people's relationships, and of course you destroy far more than you discover. And even what you discover will never be the same as it was before you came; the nubbly scars of your passage will remain. At the very least. you have asked questions that expose to the destroying air fibers that can only exist and fulfill their function in coddling darkness. Cousin Amy, now, mousing about in back passages or trilling with feverish shyness at sherry parties—was she really made all the way through of dust and fluff and unused ends of cotton and rusty needles and unmatching buttons and all the detritus at the bottom of God's sewing basket? Or did He put a machine in there to tick away and keep her will stern and her back straight as she picks out of a vase of brown-at-the-edges dahlias the few blooms that have another day's life in them? Or another machine, one of His chemistry sets, that slowly mixes itself into an apparently uncaused explosion, poof!, and there the survivors are sitting covered with plaster dust among the rubble of their lives. It's always been the explosion by the time the police come stamping in with ignorant heels on the last unbroken bit of Bristol glass; with luck they can trace the explosion back to harmless little Amy, but as to what set her off—what were the ingredients of the chemistry set and what joggled them together—it was like trying to reconstruct a civilization from three broken pots and a seven-inch lump of baked clay which might, if you looked at its swellings and hollows the right way, have been the Great Earth Mother. What's more. people who've always lived together think that they are still the same—oh, older of course and a bit more snappish, but underneath still the same laughing lad of thirty years gone by. "My Jim couldn't have done that." they say. "I know him. Course he's been a bit depressed lately, funny like. but he sometimes goes that way for a bit and then it passes off. But setting fire to the lingerie department at the Army and Navy, Inspector—such a thought wouldn't enter into my Jim's head. I know him." Tears diminishing into hiccuping snivels as doubt spreads like a coffee stain across the threadbare warp of decades. A different Jim? Different as a Martian, growing inside the ever-shedding skin? A whole lot of different Jims. a new one every seven years? "Course not. I'm the same. aren't I, same as I always was—that holiday we took hiking in the Peak District in August thirty-eight—the same inside?"
Pibble sighed and shook himself. You couldn't build a court case out of delicate tissues. Facts were the one foundation. ~ Peter Dickinson,#NFDB
1264:In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
1265:When my eyes meet his gaze as we’re sitting here staring at each other, time stops. Those eyes are piercing mine, and I can swear at this moment he senses the real me. The one without the attitude, without the façade. Just Brittany.
“What would it take for you to go out with me?” he asks.
“You’re not serious.”
“Do I look like I’m jokin’?”
Mrs. Peterson wanders by us, saving me from answering. “I’m keeping my eyes on you two. Alex, we missed you last week. What happened?”
“I kinda fell onto a knife.”
She shakes her head in disbelief, then moves away to harass other partners.
I look at Alex, wide-eyed. “A knife? You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. I was cuttin’ a tomato, and wouldn’t ya know the thing flung up and sliced my shoulder open. The doc stapled me back together. Wanna see?” he asks as he starts pulling up his sleeve.
I slap a hand over my eyes. “Alex, don’t gross me out. And I don’t believe for one second a knife flung out of your hand. You were in a knife fight.”
“You never answered my question,” he says, not admitting or denying my theory about his wound. “What would it take for you to go out with me?”
“Nothing. I wouldn’t go out with you.”
“I bet if we make out you’ll change your mind.”
“As if that’ll ever happen.”
“Your loss.” Alex stretches his long legs in front of him, his chem book resting in his lap. He looks at me with chocolate brown eyes that are so intense I swear they could hypnotize someone. “You ready?” he asks.
For a nanosecond, as I’m staring into those dark eyes, I wonder what it would be like to kiss Alex. My gaze drops to his lips. For less than a nanosecond, I can almost feel them coming closer. Would his lips be hard on mine, or soft? Is he a slow kisser, or hungry and fast like his personality?
“For what?” I whisper as I lean closer.
“The project,” he says. “Hand warmers. Peterson’s class. Chemistry.”
I shake my head, clearing all ridiculous thoughts from my overactive teenage mind. I must be sleep-deprived. “Yeah, hand warmers.” I open my chem book.
“Brittany?”
“What?” I say, staring blindly at the words on the page. I have no clue what I’m reading because I’m too embarrassed to concentrate.
“You were lookin’ at me like you wanted to kiss me.”
I force a laugh. “Yeah, right,” I say sarcastically.
“Nobody’s watchin’ if you want to, you know, try it. Not to brag, but I’m somewhat of an expert.”
He gives me a lazy smile, one that was probably created to melt girls’ hearts all over the globe.
“Alex, you’re not my type.” I need to tell him something to stop him from looking at me like he’s planning to do things to me I’ve only heard about.
“You only like white guys?”
“Stop that,” I say through gritted teeth.
“What?” he says, getting all serious. “It’s the truth, ain’t it? ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1266:The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The ~ Elizabeth Warren, #NFDB
1267:Blight
Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and pimpernel,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds, and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,
O that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun,
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flower,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And wheresoever their clear eyebeams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine;
The injured elements say, Not in us;
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, Not in us,
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain,
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love,
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due;
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay.
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term,
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space, is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe,
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal like a beggar's child:
With most unhandsome calculation taught,
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts, frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Blight
,#NFDB
1268:But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence, which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead? — just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y — phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly.
Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow. Egotism, monomania, the delusional traits of Blake or Smart or that guy who painted the electrically schizophrenic cats are all engaging qualities in the dead. ~ Nicholson Baker,#NFDB
1269:As Maxwell recognized, if atoms and molecules operated on the same principles as the Solar System, the world would be very different. Every atom would be different from every other, and every atom would change over time. Such a world wouldn't have chemistry as we know it, with definite substances and fixed rules.
It is not immediately obvious what makes atomic systems behave so differently. In both cases we have a massive central body attracting several small ones. The forces in play, gravitational or electrical, are broadly similar-both decrease as the square of the distance. But there are three factors which make the physical outcome very different, giving us stereotyped atoms but individualized solar systems:
1. Whereas planets differ from one another (as do stars), all electrons have exactly the same properties (as do all nuclei of a given element, or more precisely a given isotope).
2. Atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics.
3. Atoms are starved for energy.
The first item in this explanation begs the question, of course. We're trying to explain why atoms can be the same as each other, and we start off by asserting that some other things, electrons, are all the same as each other! We'll come back to that later.
But having the same parts doesn't guarantee the same outcome, by any means. Even if all planets were the same as one another, and all stars were the same as one another, there would still be many possible designs for solar systems, and they'd all be subject to change.
We've seen how quantum mechanics brings discreteness, and fixed patterns, into the description of continuous objects that obey dynamical equations. It's the story you'll recall, that unfolds in figures 24 (page 172), 25 (page 174), and 26 (page 187), and plate CC.
To close the loop, we need to understand why the electrons in atoms are usually found in just one among their infinite variety of patterns. That's where our third item comes in. The pattern with lowest energy-the so-called ground state-is the one we generally find, because atoms are starved for energy.
Why are atoms starved for energy? Ultimately, it is because the Universe is big, cold, and expanding. Atoms can pass from one pattern to another by emitting light, and losing energy, or absorbing light, and gaining energy. If emission and absorption were balanced, many patterns would be in play. That's what would happen in a hot, closed system. Light emitted at one time would be absorbed later, and a balanced equilibrium would set in. But in a big, cold, expanding Universe, emitted light leaks into vast interstellar spaces, carrying away energy that is not returned.
In this way we find that dynamical equations, which by themselves cannot impose structure, do so through jujitsu (gentle skill), focusing the power of other principles. They guide the constraining powers of quantum mechanics and cosmology. Cosmology explains their poverty of energy, and quantum mechanics shows how poverty of energy imposes structure. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1270:You’ve said, “You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow.” How does your approach to the world as a scientist affect and influence the way you approach politics? Nature is tough. You can’t fiddle with Mother Nature, she’s a hard taskmistress. So you’re forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In the soft fields, you’re not forced to be honest. There are standards, of course; on the other hand, they’re very weak. If what you propose is ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream opinion is radically different. For example, I’ve written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don’t think that’s very surprising. The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it’s involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I’m required to give a huge amount of evidence. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t object to that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high standards. So, I do extensive documentation, from the internal secret records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those standards are fine. All right, now, let’s suppose that you play the mainstream game. You can say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you to justify anything. For example, in the unimaginable circumstance that I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, “Do you think Kadhafi is a terrorist?” I could say, “Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist.” I don’t need any evidence. Suppose I said, “George Bush is a terrorist.” Well, then I would be expected to provide evidence—“Why would you say that?” In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can’t produce evidence. There’s even a name for it—I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called “concision.” He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline. First of all, he says, “Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it.” But the other answer was, “He lacks concision.” Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk. I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1271:Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.”
“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”
“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”
“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys—“
“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”
“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—“
“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”
“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.
“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive Mossmoon and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”
“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over the Schwarzkommando business.”
“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.”
They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great of bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.
“Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
“What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.”
“Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.”
They never are, in these meetings of his. ~ Thomas Pynchon,#NFDB
1272:Under the impact of Western cultural influences, the souls of many Muslim men and women are slowly shrivelling. They are letting themselves be led away from their erstwhile belief that an improvement of living standards should be but a means to improving man’s spiritual perceptions; they are falling into the same idolatry of ‘progress’ into which the Western world fell after it reduced religion to a mere melodious tinkling somewhere in the background of happening; and are thereby growing smaller in stature, not greater: for all cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small...
Not that the Muslims could not learn much from the West, especially in the fields of science and technology. But, then, acquisition of scientific notions and methods is not really ‘imitation’: and certainly not in the case of a people whose faith commands them to search for knowledge wherever it is to be found. Science is neither Western nor Eastern, for all scientific discoveries are only links in an unending chain of intellectual endeavour which embraces mankind as a whole. Every scientist builds on the foundations supplied by his predecessors, be they of his own nation or of another; and this process of building, correcting and improving goes on and on, from man to man, from age to age, from civilisation to civilisation: so that the scientific achievements of a particular age or civilisation can never be said to ‘belong’ to that age or civilisation. At various times one nation, more vigorous than others, is able to contribute more to the general fund of knowledge; but in the long run the process is shared, and legitimately so, by all. There was a time when the civilisation of the Muslims was more vigorous than the civilisation of Europe. It transmitted to Europe many technological inventions of a revolutionary nature, and more than that: the very principles of that ‘scientific method’ on which modern science and civilisation are built. Nevertheless, Jabir ibn Hayyan’s fundamental discoveries in chemistry did not make chemistry an ‘Arabian’ science; nor can algebra and trigonometry be described as ‘Muslim’ sciences, although the one was evolved by Al-Khwarizmi and the other by Al-Battani, both of whom were Muslims: just as one cannot speak of an ‘English’ Theory of Gravity, although the man who formulated it was an Englishman. All such achievements are the common property of the human race. If, therefore, the Muslims adopt, as adopt they must, modern methods in science and technology, they will do not more than follow the evolutionary instinct which causes men to avail themselves of other men’s experiences. But if they adopt - as there is no need for them to do - Western forms of life, Western manners and customs and social concepts, they will not gain thereby: for what the West can give them in this respect will not be superior to what their own culture has given them and to what their own faith points the way.
If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept process as a means and not an end in itself, they may not only retain their own inner freedom but also, perhaps, pass on to Western man the lost secret of life’s sweetness... ~ Muhammad Asad,#NFDB
1273:I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.
I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony.
And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean. ~ Sloane Crosley,#NFDB
1274:Dear Rebecca— You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two. Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended. 1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest. 2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date. 3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting. 4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident. Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference. I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Bradley ~ Dexter Palmer, #NFDB
1275:His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way—
SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits.
1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.
2. Philosophy.—Nil.
3. Astronomy.—Nil.
4. Politics.—Feeble.
5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna,
opium, and poisons generally.
Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Geology.—Practical, but limited.
Tells at a glance different soils
from each other. After walks has
shown me splashes upon his trousers,
and told me by their colour and
consistence in what part of London
he had received them.
7. Chemistry.—Profound.
8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.
9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears
to know every detail of every horror
perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
1276:The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
1277:Okay, so I shouldn't have fucked with her on the introduction thing. Writing nothing except, Saturday night. You and me. Driving lessons and hot sex ... in her notebook probably wasn't the smartest move. But I was itching to make Little Miss Perfecta stumble in her introduction of me. And stumbling she is.
"Miss Ellis?"
I watch in amusement as Perfection herself looks up at Peterson. Oh, she's good. This partner of mine knows how to hide her true emotions, something I recognize because I do it all the time.
"Yes?" Brittany says, tilting her head and smiling like a beauty queen.
I wonder if that smile has ever gotten her out of a speeding ticket.
"It's your turn. Introduce Alex to the class."
I lean an elbow on the lab table, waiting for an introduction she has to either make up or fess up she knows less than crap about me. She glances at my comfortable position and I can tell from her deer-in-the-headlights look I've stumped her.
"This is Alejandro Fuentes," she starts, her voice hitching the slightest bit. My temper flares at the mention of my given name, but I keep a cool facade as she continues with a made-up introduction. "When he wasn't hanging out on street corners and harassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what I mean. And he has a secret desire nobody would ever guess."
The room suddenly becomes quiet. Even Peterson straightens to attention. Hell, even I'm listening like the words coming out of Brittany's lying, pink-frosted lips are gospel.
"His secret desire," she continues, "is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you, Mrs. Peterson."
Yeah, right. I look over at my friend Isa, who seems amused that a white girl isn't afraid of giving me smack in front of the entire class.
Brittany flashes me a triumphant smile, thinking she's won this round. Guess again, gringa.
I sit up in my chair while the class remains silent.
"This is Brittany Ellis," I say, all eyes now focused on me. "This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes so she could expand her wardrobe, and spent her daddy's money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets."
It might not be what she wrote, but it's probably close enough to the truth. Unlike her introduction of me.
Chuckles come from mis cuates in the back of the class, and Brittany is as stiff as a board beside me, as if my words hurt her precious ego. Brittany Ellis is used to people fawning all over her and she could use a little wake-up call. I'm actually doing her a favor. Little does she know I'm not finished with her intro.
"Her secret desire," I add, getting the same reaction as she did during her introduction, "is to date a Mexicano before she graduates."
As expected, my words are met by comments and low whistles from the back of the room.
"Way to go, Fuentes," my friend Lucky barks out.
"I'll date you, mamacita, " another says.
I give a high five to another Latino Blood named Marcus sitting behind me just as I catch Isa shaking her head as if I did something wrong. What? I'm just having a little fun with a rich girl from the north side.
Brittany's gaze shifts from Colin to me. I take one look at Colin and with my eyes tell him game on. Colin's face instantly turns bright red, resembling a chile pepper. I have definitely invaded his territory. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
1278:76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth – Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron – Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces ~ Mortimer J Adler,#NFDB
1279:Two Gardens In Linndale
Two brothers, Oakes and Oliver,
Two gentle men as ever were,
Would roam no longer, but abide
In Linndale, where their fathers died,
And each would be a gardener.
“Now first we fence the garden through,
With this for me and that for you,”
Said Oliver.—“Divine!” said Oakes,
“And I, while I raise artichokes,
Will do what I was born to do.”
“But this is not the soil, you know,”
Said Oliver, “to make them grow:
The parent of us, who is dead,
Compassionately shook his head
Once on a time and told me so.”
“I hear you, gentle Oliver,”
Said Oakes, “and in your character
I find as fair a thing indeed
As ever bloomed and ran to seed
Since Adam was a gardener.
“Still, whatsoever I find there,
Forgive me if I do not share
The knowing gloom that you take on
Of one who doubted and is done:
For chemistry meets every prayer.”
“Sometimes a rock will meet a plough,”
Said Oliver; “but anyhow
’Tis here we are, ’tis here we live,
With each to take and each to give:
There’s no room for a quarrel now.
“I leave you in all gentleness
To science and a ripe success.
Now God be with you, brother Oakes,
385
With you and with your artichokes:
You have the vision, more or less.”
“By fate, that gives to me no choice,
I have the vision and the voice:
Dear Oliver, believe in me,
And we shall see what we shall see;
Henceforward let us both rejoice.”
“But first, while we have joy to spare
We’ll plant a little here and there;
And if you be not in the wrong,
We’ll sing together such a song
As no man yet sings anywhere.”
They planted and with fruitful eyes
Attended each his enterprise.
“Now days will come and days will go,
And many a way be found, we know,”
Said Oakes, “and we shall sing, likewise.”
“The days will go, the years will go,
And many a song be sung, we know,”
Said Oliver; “and if there be
Good harvesting for you and me,
Who cares if we sing loud or low?”
They planted once, and twice, and thrice,
Like amateurs in paradise;
And every spring, fond, foiled, elate,
Said Oakes, “We are in tune with Fate:
One season longer will suffice.”
Year after year ’twas all the same:
With none to envy, none to blame,
They lived along in innocence,
Nor ever once forgot the fence,
Till on a day the Stranger came.
He came to greet them where they were,
And he too was a Gardener:
He stood between these gentle men,
386
He stayed a little while, and then
The land was all for Oliver.
’Tis Oliver who tills alone
Two gardens that are now his own;
’Tis Oliver who sows and reaps
And listens, while the other sleeps,
For songs undreamed of and unknown.
’Tis he, the gentle anchorite,
Who listens for them day and night;
But most he hears them in the dawn,
When from his trees across the lawn
Birds ring the chorus of the light.
He cannot sing without the voice,
But he may worship and rejoice
For patience in him to remain,
The chosen heir of age and pain,
Instead of Oakes—who had no choice.
’Tis Oliver who sits beside
The other’s grave at eventide,
And smokes, and wonders what new race
Will have two gardens, by God’s grace,
In Linndale, where their fathers died.
And often, while he sits and smokes,
He sees the ghost of gentle Oakes
Uprooting, with a restless hand,
Soft, shadowy flowers in a land
Of asphodels and artichokes.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,#NFDB
1280:I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist. Carbon is abundant in the Cosmos. It makes marvelously complex molecules, good for life. I am also a water chauvinist. Water makes an ideal solvent system for organic chemistry to work in and stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. But sometimes I wonder. Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact that I am made chiefly of them? Are we carbon- and water-based because those materials were abundant on the Earth at the time of the origin of life? Could life elsewhere—on Mars, say—be built of different stuff? I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else? Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately, there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings. I think the lifeforms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids—but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much colder than the Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth, as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all—solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about. But these ideas do not ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1281:Sam’s the man who’s come to chop us up to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. If he cannot stop death, what good is he? ‘Open the door. Please. I’m so tired,’ he says. I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what’s love, what’s fear? ‘If you’re Sam who am I?’ ‘I know who you are.’ ‘You do?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Who?’ Don’t say wife, I think. Don’t say mother. I put my face to the glass, but it’s dark. I don’t reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the kitchen door. He coughs some more. ‘I want to come home,’ he says. ‘I want us to be okay. That’s it. Simple. I want to come home and be a family.’ ‘But I am not simple.’ My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my body? That seems very dangerous. There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds. I am a chemistry project conducted by a wild child. I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives.
‘In what ways are you not simple?’ I think of the women I collected upstairs. They’re inside me. And they are only a small fraction of the catalog. I think of molds, of the sea, the biodiversity of plankton. I think of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say, and then the things I don’t say yet. Words aren’t going to be the best way here. How to explain something that’s coming into existence? ‘I get that now.’ His shoulders tremble some. They jerk. He coughs. I have infected him. ‘Sam.’ We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks. ‘Unlock the door,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.’ ‘So you imagine bad things about me. You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me. Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Right.’ And I’m glad he gets that. Sam cocks his head the same way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus mortality. What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security? Coyotes are not moral. ‘Unlock the door?’ he asks. This family is an experiment, the biggest I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in? ‘Unlock the door,’ he says again. ‘Please.’ I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love. Sam comes inside. He turns to shut the door, then stops himself. He stares out into the darkness where he came from. What does he think is out there? What does he know? Or is he scared I’ll kick him out again? That is scary. ‘What if we just left the door open?’ he asks. ‘Open.’ And more, more things I don’ts say about the bodies of women. ‘Yeah.’ ‘What about skunks?’ I mean burglars, gangs, evil. We both peer out into the dark, looking for thees scary things. We watch a long while. The night does nothing. ‘We could let them in if they want in,’ he says, but seems uncertain still. ‘Really?’ He draws the door open wider and we leave it that way, looking out at what we can’t see. Unguarded, unafraid, love and loved. We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think of as the night. ~ Samantha Hunt,#NFDB
1282:Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God? ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
1283:Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t.
Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass.
Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.”
I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal. ~ Bruce Springsteen,#NFDB
1284:My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.
For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’.
Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme. ~ Muhammad Asad,#NFDB
1285:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #NFDB
1286:Understand That This Is A Dream
Real as a dream
What shall I do with this great opportunity to fly?
What is the interpretation of this planet, this moon?
if I can dream that I dream / and dream anything dreamable / can I dream
I am awake / and why do that?
When I dream in a dream that I wake / up what
happens when I try to move?
I dream that I move
and the effort moves and moves
till I move / and my arm hurts
Then I wake up / dismayed / I was dreaming / I was waking
when I was dreaming still / just now.
and try to remember next time in dreams
that I am in dreaming.
And dream anything I want when I'm awaken.
When I'm in awakeness what do I desire?
I desire to fulfill my emotional belly.
My whole body my heart in my fingertops thrill with some old fulfillments.
Pages of celestial rhymes burning fire-words
unconsumable but disappear.
Arcane parchments my own and the universe the answer.
Belly to Belly and knee to knee.
The hot spurt of my body to thee and thee
old boy / dreamy Earl / you Prince of Paterson / now king of me / lost
Haledon
first dream that made me take down my pants
urgently to show the cars / auto tracks / rolling down avenue hill.
That far back what do I remember / but the face of the leader of the gang
was blond / that loved me / one day on the steps of his house blocks away
all afternoon I told him about my magic Spell
I can do anything I want / palaces millions / chemistry sets / chicken
coops / white horses
stables and torture basements / I inspect my naked victims
chained upside down / my fingertips thrill approval on their thighs
white hairless cheeks I may kiss all I want
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at my mercy. on the racks.
I pass with my strong attendants / I am myself naked
bending down with my buttocks out
for their smacks of reproval / o the heat of desire
liek shit in my asshole. The strange gang
across the street / thru the grocerystore / in the wood alley / out in the open
on the corner
Because I lied to the Dentist about that chickencoop roofing / slate stolen off
his garage
by me and the boy I loved who would punish me if he knew
what I loved him.
That now I have had that boy back in another blond form
Peter Orlovsky a Chinese teenager in Bangkok ten years twenty years
Jo Army on the campus / white blond loins / my mouth hath kisses /
full of his cock / my ass burning / full of his cock
all that I do desire. In dream and awake
this handsome body mine / answered
all I desired / intimate loves / open eyed / revealed at last / clothes on the
floor
Underwear the most revealing stripped off below the belly button in bed.
That's that / yes yes / the flat cocks the red pricks the gentle public hair /
alone with me
my magic spell. My power / what I desire alone / what after thirty years /
I got forever / after thirty years / satisfied enough with Peter / with all I
wanted /
with many men I knew one generation / our sperm passing
into our mouths and bellies / beautiful when I love / given.
Now the dream oldens / I olden / my hair a year long / my thirtyeight
birthday approaching.
I dream I
am bald / am disappearing / the campus unrecognizable / Haledon Avenue
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will be covered with neon / motels / Supermarkets / iron
the porches and woods changed when i go back / to see Earl again
He'll be bald / fleshy father / I could pursie him further in the garage
If there's still a garage on the hill / on the planet / when I get back.
From Asia.
If I could even remember his name or his face / or find him /
When I was ten / perhaps he exists in some form.
With a belly and a belt and an auto
Whatever his last name / I never knew / in the phonebook / the Akashic
records.
I'll write my Inspiration for all Mankind to remember,
My Idea, the secret cave / in the clothes closet / that house probably down /
Nothing to go back to / everything's gone / only my idea
that's disappearing / even in dreams / gray dust piles / instant annihilation
of World War II and all its stainless steel shining-mouthed cannons
much less me and my grammar school kisses / I never kissed in time /
and go on kissing in dream and out on the street / as if it were for ever.
No forever left! Even my oldest forever gone, in Bangkok, in Benares,
swept up with words and bodies / all into the brown Ganges /
passing the burning grounds and / into the police state.
My mind, my mind / you had six feet of Earth to hoe /
Why didn't you remember and plant the seed of Law and gather the sprouts
of What?
the golden blossoms of what idea? If I dream that I dream / what dream
should I dream next? Motorcycle rickshaws / parting lamp shine / little
taxis / horses hoofs
on this Saigon midnight street. Angkor Wat ahead and the ruined city's old
Hindu faces
and there was a dream about Eternity. What should I dream when I wake?
What's left to dream, more Chinese meat? More magic Spells? More youths
to love before I change & disappear?
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More dream words? For now that I know that I am dreaming /
What next for you Allen? Run down to the Presidents Palace full of Morphine /
The cocks crowing / in the street / Dawn trucks / What is the question?
Do I need sleep, now that there's light in the window?
I'll go to sleep. Signing off until / the next idea / the moving van arrives
empty
at the Doctor's house full of Chinese furniture.
~ Allen Ginsberg,#NFDB
1287:Elegy: Walking the Line
Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In solstice bloom, all white, most graciously.
On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale in Mister Haymore's yard
In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore,
One of the two good teachers at Boys' High,
Ironic and demanding, chemistry;
Mary Lou Culver taught us English: essays,
Plot summaries, outlines, meters, kinds of clauses
(Noun, adjective, and adverb, five at a time),
Written each day and then revised, and she
Up half the night to read them once again
Through her pince-nez, under a single lamp.
Across the road, on a steeper hill, the settlers
Set a house, unpainted, the porch fallen in,
The road a red clay strip without a bridge,
A shallow stream that liked to overflow.
Oliver Brand's mules pulled our station wagon
Out of the gluey mire, earth's rust. Then, here
And there, back from the road, the specimen
Shrubs and small trees my father planted, some
Taller than we were, some in bloom, some berried,
And some we still brought water to. We always
14
Paused at the weed-filled hole beside the beech
That, one year, brought forth beech nuts by the thousands,
A hole still reminiscent of the man
Chewing tobacco in among his whiskers
My father happened on, who, discovered, told
Of dreaming he should dig there for the gold
And promised to give half of what he found.
During the wars with Germany and Japan,
Descendents of the settlers, of Oliver Brand
And of that man built Flying Fortresses
For Lockheed, in Atlanta; now they build
Brick mansions in the woods they left, with lawns
To paved and lighted streets, azaleas, camellias
Blooming among the pines and tulip trees—
Mercedes Benz and Cadillac Republicans.
There was another stream further along
Divided through a marsh, lined by the fence
We stretched to posts with Mister Garner's help
The time he needed cash for his son's bail
And offered all his place. A noble spring
Under the oak root cooled his milk and butter.
He called me "honey," working with us there
(My father bought three acres as a gift),
His wife pale, hair a country orange, voice
Uncanny, like a ghost's, through the open door
Behind her, chickens scratching on the floor.
Barred Rocks, our chickens; one, a rooster, splendid
Sliver and grey, red comb and long sharp spurs,
Once chased Aunt Jennie as far as the daphne bed
The two big king snakes were familiars of.
My father's dog would challenge him sometimes
To laughter and applause. Once, in Stone Mountain,
Travelers, stopped for gas, drove off with Smokey;
Angrily, grievingly, leaving his work, my father
Traced the car and found them way far south,
Had them arrested and, bringing Smokey home,
Was proud as Sherlock Holmes, and happier.
Above the spring, my sister's cats, black Amy,
Grey Junior, down to meet us. The rose trees,
Domestic, Asiatic, my father's favorites.
The bridge, marauding dragonflies, the bullfrog,
15
Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze,
Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple,
Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub,
The owls' tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump
Thirty feet down the mountain's granite foot.
Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even drive a tractor,
Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned.
When, at the trial to garnishee his wages,
Frank Guess, the judge, Grandmother's longtime neighbor,
Whose children my mother taught in Cradle Roll,
Heard Mort's examination, he broke in
As if in disbelief on the bank's attorneys:
"Gentlemen, must we continue this charade?"
Finally, past the compost heap, the garden,
Tomatoes and sweet corn for succotash,
Okra for frying, Kentucky Wonders, limas,
Cucumbers, squashes, leeks heaped round with soil,
Lavender, dill, parsley, and rosemary,
Tithonia and zinnias between the rows;
The greenhouse by the rock wall, used for cuttings
In late spring, frames to grow them strong for planting
Through winter into summer. Early one morning
Mort called out, lying helpless by the bridge.
His ashes we let drift where the magnolia
We planted as a stem divides the path
The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill,
Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives
Three thousand miles away, beside the bare
Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission,
The Riviera, and the silver range
La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora
And one druidic live oak guard the view.
Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings
Of twenty years ago: the great oak's arm
Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wisteria
Tangled among the branches, amaryllis
16
Around the base; her cat, UC, at ease
In marigolds; the weeping cherry, pink
And white arms like a blessing to the blue
Bird feeder Mort made; cabin, scarlet sweet gum
Superb when tribes migrated north and south.
Alert, still quick of speech, a little blind,
Active, ready for laughter, open to fear,
Pity, and wonder that such things may be,
Some Sundays, I think, she must walk the line,
Aunt Jennie, too, if she were still alive,
And Eleanor, whose story is untold,
Their presences like muses, prompting me
In my small study, all listening to the sea,
All of one mind, the true posterity.
~ Edgar Bowers,#NFDB
1288: In the Moonlight
If now must pause the bullocks' jingling tune,
Here let it be beneath the dreaming trees
Supine and huge that hang upon the breeze,
Here in the wide eye of the silent moon.
How living a stillness reigns! The night's hushed rules
All things obey but three, the slow wind's sigh
Among the leaves, the cricket's ceaseless cry,
The frog's harsh discord in the ringing pools.
Yet they but seem the silence to increase
And dreadful wideness of the inhuman night.
The whole hushed world immeasurable might
Be watching round this single spot of peace.
So boundless is the darkness and so rife
With thoughts of infinite reach that it creates
A dangerous sense of space and abrogates
The wholesome littleness of human life.
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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
The common round that each of us must tread
Now seems a thing unreal; we forget
The heavy yoke the world on us has set,
The slave's vain labour earning tasteless bread.
Space hedges us and Time our hearts o'ertakes;
Our bounded senses and our boundless thought
Strive through the centuries and are slowly brought
Back to the source whence their divergence wakes.
The source that none have traced, since none can know
Whether from Heaven the eternal waters well
Through Nature's matted locks, as Ganges fell,
Or from some dismal nether darkness flow.
Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
Two great unhappy foes together bound
Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began.
One from his body like a bridge of fire
Mounts upward azure-winged with eager eyes;
One in his brain deep-mansioned labouring lies
And clamps to earth the spirit's high desire.
Here in this moonlight with strange visions rife
I seem to see their vast peripheries
Without me in the sombre mighty trees,
And, hark! their silence turns the wheels of life.
These are the middle and the first. Are they
The last too? Has the duel then no close?
Shall neither vanquish of the eternal foes,
Nor even at length this moonlight turn to day?
Our age has made an idol of the brain,
The last adored a purer presence; yet
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
239
In Asia like a dove immaculate
He lurks deep-brooding in the hearts of men.
But Europe comes to us bright-eyed and shrill.
"A far delusion was that mounting fire,
An impulse baulked and an unjust desire;
It fades as we ascend the human hill."
She cries to us to labour in the light
Of common things, grow beautiful and wise
On strong material food, nor vex our eyes
With straining after visionary delight.
Ah, beautiful and wise, but to what end?
Europe knows not, nor any of her schools
Who scorn the higher thought for dreams of fools;
Riches and joy and power meanwhile are gained.
Gained and then lost! For Death the heavy grip
Shall loosen, Death shall cloud the laughing eye,
And he who broke the nations soon shall lie
More helpless than a little child asleep.
And after? Nay, for death is end and term.
A fiery dragon through the centuries curled,
He feeds upon the glories of the world
And the vast mammoth dies before the worm.
Stars run their cycle and are quenched; the suns
Born from the night are to the night returned,
When the cold tenebrous spaces have inurned
The listless phantoms of the Shining Ones.
From two dead worlds a burning world arose
Of which the late putrescent fruit is man;
From chill dark space his roll of life began
And shall again in icy quiet close.
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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
Our lives are but a transitory breath:
Mean pismires in the sad and dying age
Of a once glorious planet, on the edge
Of bitter pain we wait eternal death.
Watering the ages with our sweat and blood
We pant towards some vague ideal state
And by the effort fiercer ills create,
Working by lasting evil transient good.
Insults and servitude we bear perforce;
With profitable crimes our souls we rack,
Vexing ourselves lest earth our seed should lack
Who needs us not in her perpetual course;
Then down into the earth descend and sleep
For ever, and the lives for which we toiled
Forget us, who when they their turn have moiled,
Themselves forgotten into silence creep.
Why is it all, the labour and the din,
And wherefore do we plague our souls and vex
Our bodies or with doubts our days perplex?
Death levels soon the virtue with the sin.
If Death be end and close the useless strife,
Strive not at all, but take what ease you may
And make a golden glory of the day,
Exhaust the little honey of your life.
Fear not to take her beauty to your heart
Whom you so utterly desire; you do
No hurt to any, for the inner you
So cherished is a dream that shall depart.
The wine of life is sweet; let no man stint
His longing or refuse one passionate hope.
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
Why should we cabin in such infinite scope,
Restrict the issue of such golden mint?
Society forbids? It for our sakes
Was fashioned; if it seek to fence around
Our joys and pleasures in such narrow bound,
It gives us little for the much it takes.
Nor need we hearken to the gospel vain
That bids men curb themselves to help mankind.
We lose our little chance of bliss, then blind
And silent lie for ever. Whose the gain?
What helps it us if so mankind be served?
Ourselves are blotted out from joy and light,
Having no profit of the sunshine bright,
While others reap the fruit our toils deserved.
O this new god who has replaced the old!
He dies today, he dies tomorrow, dies
At last for ever, and the last sunrise
Shall have forgotten him extinct and cold.
But virtue to itself is joy enough?
Yet if to us sin taste diviner? why
Should we not herd in Epicurus' sty
Whom Nature made not of a Stoic stuff?
For Nature being all, desire must reign.
It is too sweet and strong for us to slay
Upon a nameless altar, saying nay
To honied urgings for no purpose plain.
A strange unreal gospel Science brings, -
Being animals to act as angels might;
Mortals we must put forth immortal might
And flutter in the void celestial wings.
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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
"Ephemeral creatures, for the future live,"
She bids us, "gather in for unborn men
Knowledge and joy, and forfeit, nor complain,
The present which alone is yours to give."
Man's immortality she first denies
And then assumes what she rejects, made blind
By sudden knowledge, the majestic Mind
Within her smiling at her sophistries.
Not so shall Truth extend her flight sublime,
Pass from the poor beginnings she has made
And with the splendour of her wings displayed
Range through the boundaries of Space and Time.
Clamp her not down to her material finds!
She shall go further. She shall not reject
The light within, nor shall the dialect
Of unprogressive pedants bar men's minds.
We seek the Truth and will not pause nor fear.
Truth we will have and not the sophist's pleas;
Animals, we will take our grosser ease,
Or, spirits, heaven's celestial music hear.
The intellect is not all; a guide within
Awaits our question. He it was informed
The reason, He surpasses; and unformed
Presages of His mightiness begin.
Nor mind submerged, nor self subliminal,
But the great Force that makes the planets wheel
Through ether and the sun in flames reveal
His godhead, is in us perpetual.
That Force in us is body, that is mind,
And what is higher than the mind is He.
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
This was the secret Science could not see;
Aware of death, to life her eyes were blind.
Through chemistry she seeks the source of life,
Nor knows the mighty laws that she has found,
Are Nature's bye-laws merely, meant to ground
A grandiose freedom building peace by strife.
The organ for the thing itself she takes,
The brain for mind, the body for the soul,
Nor has she patience to explore the whole,
But like a child a hasty period makes.
"It is enough," she says, "I have explored
The whole of being; nothing now remains
But to put details in and count my gains."
So she deceives herself, denies her Lord.
Therefore He manifests Himself; once more
The wonders of the secret world within
Wrapped yet with an uncertain mist begin
To look from that thick curtain out; the door
Opens. Her days are numbered, and not long
Shall she be suffered to belittle thus
Man and restrain from his tempestuous
Uprising that immortal spirit strong.
He rises now; for God has taken birth.
The revolutions that pervade the world
Are faint beginnings and the discus hurled
Of Vishnu speeds down to enring the earth.
The old shall perish; it shall pass away,
Expunged, annihilated, blotted out;
And all the iron bands that ring about
Man's wide expansion shall at last give way.
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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
Freedom, God, Immortality; the three
Are one and shall be realised at length,
Love, Wisdom, Justice, Joy and utter Strength
Gather into a pure felicity.
It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,
Vision and vain imagination deemed,
The City of Delight, the Age of Gold.
The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed,
Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow.
This is man's progress; for the Iron Age
Prepares the Age of Gold. What we call sin,
Is but man's leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage.
He leaves behind the ill with strife and pain,
Because it clings and constantly returns,
And in the fire of suffering fiercely burns
More sweetness to deserve, more strength to gain.
He rises to the good with Titan wings:
And this the reason of his high unease,
Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things;
The body with increasing soul to fill,
Extend Heaven's claim upon the toiling earth
And climb from death to a diviner birth
Grasped and supported by immortal Will.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - In the Moonlight
,#NFDB
1289:The spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,
Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.
Whoever should behold me now, I wist,
Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart
Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win
Its way over the sea, and sport therein;
For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch
Ixion or the Titan:or the quick
Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,
To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic,
Or those in philanthropic council met,
Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire:
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag,
Which fishers found under the utmost crag
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn,
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep;and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread,
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood;
And forms of unimaginable wood,
To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood:
Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and groovd blocks,
The elements of what will stand the shocks
Of wave and wind and time.Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able
To catalogize in this verse of mine:
A pretty bowl of woodnot full of wine,
But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink,
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who
Reply to them in lavacry halloo!
And call out to the cities o'er their head,
Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying and the dead,
Crash through the chinks of earthand then all quaff
Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.
This quicksilver no gnome has drunkwithin
The walnut bowl it lies, veind and thin,
In colour like the wake of light that stains
The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white firethe breeze
Is stillblue Heaven smiles over the pale seas.
And in this bowl of quicksilverfor I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy
Outlasting manhoodI have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat:
A hollow screw with cogsHenry will know
The thing I mean and laugh at me,if so
He fears not I should do more mischief.Next
Lie bills and calculations much perplexed,
With steam-boats, frigates, and machinery quaint
Traced over them in blue and yellow paint.
Then comes a range of mathematical
Instruments, for plans nautical and statical;
A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass
With ink in it;a china cup that was
What it will never be again, I think,
A thing from which sweet lips were wont to drink
The liquor doctors rail atand which I
Will quaff in spite of themand when we die
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out,'Heads or tails?' where'er we be.
Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks,
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms,
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
Of figures,disentangle them who may.
Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie,
And some odd volumes of old chemistry.
Near those a most inexplicable thing,
With lead in the middleI'm conjecturing
How to make Henry understand; but no
I'll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo,
This secret in the pregnant womb of time,
Too vast a matter for so weak a rhyme.
And here like some weird Archimage sit I,
Plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery,
The self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind
Which pump up oaths from clergymen, and grind
The gentle spirit of our meek reviews
Into a powdery foam of salt abuse,
Ruffling the ocean of their self-content;
I sitand smile or sigh as is my bent,
But not for themLibeccio rushes round
With an inconstant and an idle sound,
I heed him more than themthe thunder-smoke
Is gathering on the mountains, like a cloak
Folded athwart their shoulders broad and bare;
The ripe corn under the undulating air
Undulates like an ocean;and the vines
Are trembling wide in all their trellised lines
The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill
The empty pauses of the blast;the hill
Looks hoary through the white electric rain,
And from the glens beyond, in sullen strain,
The interrupted thunder howls; above
One chasm of Heaven smiles, like the eye of Love
On the unquiet world;while such things are,
How could one worth your friendship heed the war
Of worms? the shriek of the world's carrion jays,
Their censure, or their wonder, or their praise?
You are not here! the quaint witch Memory sees,
In vacant chairs, your absent images,
And points where once you sat, and now should be
But are not.I demand if ever we
Shall meet as then we met;and she replies,
Veiling in awe her second-sighted eyes;
'I know the past alonebut summon home
My sister Hope,she speaks of all to come.'
But I, an old diviner, who knew well
Every false verse of that sweet oracle,
Turned to the sad enchantress once again,
And sought a respite from my gentle pain,
In citing every passage o'er and o'er
Of our communionhow on the sea-shore
We watched the ocean and the sky together,
Under the roof of blue Italian weather;
How I ran home through last year's thunder-storm,
And felt the transverse lightning linger warm
Upon my cheekand how we often made
Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed
The frugal luxury of our country cheer,
As well it might, were it less firm and clear
Than ours must ever be;and how we spun
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life, which seems to be
But is not:or is but quaint mockery
Of all we would believe, and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
Of this wrong world:and then anatomize
The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes
Were closed in distant years;or widely guess
The issue of the earth's great business,
When we shall be as we no longer are
Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war
Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not;or how
You listened to some interrupted flow
Of visionary rhyme,in joy and pain
Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain,
With little skill perhaps;or how we sought
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years,
Staining their sacred waters with our tears;
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!
Or how I, wisest lady! then endued
The language of a land which now is free,
And, winged with thoughts of truth and majesty,
Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud,
And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud,
'My name is Legion!'that majestic tongue
Which Calderon over the desert flung
Of ages and of nations; and which found
An echo in our hearts, and with the sound
Startled oblivion;thou wert then to me
As is a nursewhen inarticulately
A child would talk as its grown parents do.
If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,
If hawks chase doves through the aethereal way,
Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,
Why should not we rouse with the spirit's blast
Out of the forest of the pathless past
These recollected pleasures?
You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
That which was Godwin,greater none than he
Though fallenand fallen on evil timesto stand
Among the spirits of our age and land,
Before the dread tribunal of to come
The foremost,while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb.
You will see Coleridgehe who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
You will see Huntone of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it isa tomb;
Who is, what others seem; his room no doubt
Is still adorned with many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers tastefully placed about;
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung;
The gifts of the most learned among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins.
And there is he with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns
Thundering for money at a poet's door;
Alas! it is no use to say, 'I'm poor!'
Or oft in graver mood, when he will look
Things wiser than were ever read in book,
Except in Shakespeare's wisest tenderness.
You will see Hogg,and I cannot express
His virtues,though I know that they are great,
Because he locks, then barricades the gate
Within which they inhabit;of his wit
And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit.
He is a pearl within an oyster shell,
One of the richest of the deep;and there
Is English Peacock, with his mountain Fair,
Turned into a Flamingo;that shy bird
That gleams i' the Indian airhave you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him?but you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
Matched with this cameleopardhis fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learnd for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page,
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time,
Fold itself up for the serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.Wit and sense,
Virtue and human knowledge; all that might
Make this dull world a business of delight,
Are all combined in Horace Smith.And these,
With some exceptions, which I need not tease
Your patience by descanting on,are all
You and I know in London.
I recall
My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night.
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight
Fills the void, hollow, universal air
What see you?unpavilioned Heaven is fair,
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep;
Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep,
Piloted by the many-wandering blast,
And the rare stars rush through them dim and fast:
All this is beautiful in every land.
But what see you beside?a shabby stand
Of Hackney coachesa brick house or wall
Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl
Of our unhappy politics;or worse
A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse
Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade,
You must accept in place of serenade
Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring
To Henry, some unutterable thing.
I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
Built round dark caverns, even to the root
Of the living stems that feed themin whose bowers
There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;
Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn
Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne
In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance,
Like wingd stars the fire-flies flash and glance,
Pale in the open moonshine, but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the milky way;
Afar the Contadino's song is heard,
Rude, but made sweet by distanceand a bird
Which cannot be the Nightingale, and yet
I know none else that sings so sweet as it
At this late hour;and then all is still
NowItaly or London, which you will!
Next winter you must pass with me; I'll have
My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are;
Oh! that Hunt, Hogg, Peacock, and Smith were there,
With everything belonging to them fair!
We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek;
And ask one week to make another week
As like his father, as I'm unlike mine,
Which is not his fault, as you may divine.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,
Feasting on which we will philosophize!
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood,
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk;what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout
Of thought-entangled descant;as to nerves
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother mewhen you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum,
From Helicon or Himeros[1];well, come,
And in despite of God and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time; till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours,
Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew;
'To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.'
Composed during Shelley's occupation of the Gisbornes' house at Leghorn, July 1820; published in Posthumous Poems, 1824.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letter To Maria Gisborne
,#NFDB
1290:Tasker Norcross
“Whether all towns and all who live in them—
So long as they be somewhere in this world
That we in our complacency call ours—
Are more or less the same, I leave to you.
I should say less. Whether or not, meanwhile,
We’ve all two legs—and as for that, we haven’t—
There were three kinds of men where I was born:
The good, the not so good, and Tasker Norcross.
Now there are two kinds.”
“Meaning, as I divine,
Your friend is dead,” I ventured.
Ferguson,
Who talked himself at last out of the world
He censured, and is therefore silent now,
Agreed indifferently: “My friends are dead—
Or most of them.”
“Remember one that isn’t,”
I said, protesting. “Honor him for his ears;
Treasure him also for his understanding.”
Ferguson sighed, and then talked on again:
“You have an overgrown alacrity
For saying nothing much and hearing less;
And I’ve a thankless wonder, at the start,
How much it is to you that I shall tell
What I have now to say of Tasker Norcross,
And how much to the air that is around you.
But given a patience that is not averse
To the slow tragedies of haunted men—
Horrors, in fact, if you’ve a skilful eye
To know them at their firesides, or out walking,—”
“Horrors,” I said, “are my necessity;
And I would have them, for their best effect,
Always out walking.”
Ferguson frowned at me:
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“The wisest of us are not those who laugh
Before they know. Most of us never know—
Or the long toil of our mortality
Would not be done. Most of us never know—
And there you have a reason to believe
In God, if you may have no other. Norcross,
Or so I gather of his infirmity,
Was given to know more than he should have known,
And only God knows why. See for yourself
An old house full of ghosts of ancestors,
Who did their best, or worst, and having done it,
Died honorably; and each with a distinction
That hardly would have been for him that had it,
Had honor failed him wholly as a friend.
Honor that is a friend begets a friend.
Whether or not we love him, still we have him;
And we must live somehow by what we have,
Or then we die. If you say chemistry,
Then you must have your molecules in motion,
And in their right abundance. Failing either,
You have not long to dance. Failing a friend,
A genius, or a madness, or a faith
Larger than desperation, you are here
For as much longer than you like as may be.
Imagining now, by way of an example,
Myself a more or less remembered phantom—
Again, I should say less—how many times
A day should I come back to you? No answer.
Forgive me when I seem a little careless,
But we must have examples, or be lucid
Without them; and I question your adherence
To such an undramatic narrative
As this of mine, without the personal hook.”
“A time is given in Ecclesiastes
For divers works,” I told him. “Is there one
For saying nothing in return for nothing?
If not, there should be.” I could feel his eyes,
And they were like two cold inquiring points
Of a sharp metal. When I looked again,
To see them shine, the cold that I had felt
Was gone to make way for a smouldering
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Of lonely fire that I, as I knew then,
Could never quench with kindness or with lies.
I should have done whatever there was to do
For Ferguson, yet I could not have mourned
In honesty for once around the clock
The loss of him, for my sake or for his,
Try as I might; nor would his ghost approve,
Had I the power and the unthinking will
To make him tread again without an aim
The road that was behind him—and without
The faith, or friend, or genius, or the madness
That he contended was imperative.
After a silence that had been too long,
“It may be quite as well we don’t,” he said;
“As well, I mean, that we don’t always say it.
You know best what I mean, and I suppose
You might have said it better. What was that?
Incorrigible? Am I incorrigible?
Well, it’s a word; and a word has its use,
Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.
It’s a good word enough. Incorrigible,
May be, for all I know, the word for Norcross.
See for yourself that house of his again
That he called home: An old house, painted white,
Square as a box, and chillier than a tomb
To look at or to live in. There were trees—
Too many of them, if such a thing may be—
Before it and around it. Down in front
There was a road, a railroad, and a river;
Then there were hills behind it, and more trees.
The thing would fairly stare at you through trees,
Like a pale inmate out of a barred window
With a green shade half down; and I dare say
People who passed have said: ‘There’s where he lives.
We know him, but we do not seem to know
That we remember any good of him,
Or any evil that is interesting.
There you have all we know and all we care.’
They might have said it in all sorts of ways;
And then, if they perceived a cat, they might
Or might not have remembered what they said.
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The cat might have a personality—
And maybe the same one the Lord left out
Of Tasker Norcross, who, for lack of it,
Saw the same sun go down year after year;
All which at last was my discovery.
And only mine, so far as evidence
Enlightens one more darkness. You have known
All round you, all your days, men who are nothing—
Nothing, I mean, so far as time tells yet
Of any other need it has of them
Than to make sextons hardy—but no less
Are to themselves incalculably something,
And therefore to be cherished. God, you see,
Being sorry for them in their fashioning,
Indemnified them with a quaint esteem
Of self, and with illusions long as life.
You know them well, and you have smiled at them;
And they, in their serenity, may have had
Their time to smile at you. Blessed are they
That see themselves for what they never were
Or were to be, and are, for their defect,
At ease with mirrors and the dim remarks
That pass their tranquil ears.”
“Come, come,” said I;
“There may be names in your compendium
That we are not yet all on fire for shouting.
Skin most of us of our mediocrity,
We should have nothing then that we could scratch.
The picture smarts. Cover it, if you please,
And do so rather gently. Now for Norcross.”
Ferguson closed his eyes in resignation,
While a dead sigh came out of him. “Good God!”
He said, and said it only half aloud,
As if he knew no longer now, nor cared,
If one were there to listen: “Have I said nothing—
Nothing at all—of Norcross? Do you mean
To patronize him till his name becomes
A toy made out of letters? If a name
Is all you need, arrange an honest column
Of all the people you have ever known
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That you have never liked. You’ll have enough;
And you’ll have mine, moreover. No, not yet.
If I assume too many privileges,
I pay, and I alone, for their assumption;
By which, if I assume a darker knowledge
Of Norcross than another, let the weight
Of my injustice aggravate the load
That is not on your shoulders. When I came
To know this fellow Norcross in his house,
I found him as I found him in the street—
No more, no less; indifferent, but no better.
‘Worse’ were not quite the word: he was not bad;
He was not… well, he was not anything.
Has your invention ever entertained
The picture of a dusty worm so dry
That even the early bird would shake his head
And fly on farther for another breakfast?”
“But why forget the fortune of the worm,”
I said, “if in the dryness you deplore
Salvation centred and endured? Your Norcross
May have been one for many to have envied.”
“Salvation? Fortune? Would the worm say that?
He might; and therefore I dismiss the worm
With all dry things but one. Figures away,
Do you begin to see this man a little?
Do you begin to see him in the air,
With all the vacant horrors of his outline
For you to fill with more than it will hold?
If so, you needn’t crown yourself at once
With epic laurel if you seem to fill it.
Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks
Of a new hell—if one were not enough—
I doubt if a new horror would have held him
With a malignant ingenuity
More to be feared than his before he died.
You smile, as if in doubt. Well, smile again.
Now come into his house, along with me:
The four square sombre things that you see first
Around you are four walls that go as high
As to the ceiling. Norcross knew them well,
269
And he knew others like them. Fasten to that
With all the claws of your intelligence;
And hold the man before you in his house
As if he were a white rat in a box,
And one that knew himself to be no other.
I tell you twice that he knew all about it,
That you may not forget the worst of all
Our tragedies begin with what we know.
Could Norcross only not have known, I wonder
How many would have blessed and envied him!
Could he have had the usual eye for spots
On others, and for none upon himself,
I smile to ponder on the carriages
That might as well as not have clogged the town
In honor of his end. For there was gold,
You see, though all he needed was a little,
And what he gave said nothing of who gave it.
He would have given it all if in return
There might have been a more sufficient face
To greet him when he shaved. Though you insist
It is the dower, and always, of our degree
Not to be cursed with such invidious insight,
Remember that you stand, you and your fancy,
Now in his house; and since we are together,
See for yourself and tell me what you see.
Tell me the best you see. Make a slight noise
Of recognition when you find a book
That you would not as lief read upside down
As otherwise, for example. If there you fail,
Observe the walls and lead me to the place,
Where you are led. If there you meet a picture
That holds you near it for a longer time
Than you are sorry, you may call it yours,
And hang it in the dark of your remembrance,
Where Norcross never sees. How can he see
That has no eyes to see? And as for music,
He paid with empty wonder for the pangs
Of his infrequent forced endurance of it;
And having had no pleasure, paid no more
For needless immolation, or for the sight
Of those who heard what he was never to hear.
To see them listening was itself enough
270
To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes,
On other days, of strangers who forgot
Their sorrows and their failures and themselves
Before a few mysterious odds and ends
Of marble carted from the Parthenon—
And all for seeing what he was never to see,
Because it was alive and he was dead—
Here was a wonder that was more profound
Than any that was in fiddles and brass horns.
“He knew, and in his knowledge there was death.
He knew there was a region all around him
That lay outside man’s havoc and affairs,
And yet was not all hostile to their tumult,
Where poets would have served and honored him,
And saved him, had there been anything to save.
But there was nothing, and his tethered range
Was only a small desert. Kings of song
Are not for thrones in deserts. Towers of sound
And flowers of sense are but a waste of heaven
Where there is none to know them from the rocks
And sand-grass of his own monotony
That makes earth less than earth. He could see that,
And he could see no more. The captured light
That may have been or not, for all he cared,
The song that is in sculpture was not his,
But only, to his God-forgotten eyes,
One more immortal nonsense in a world
Where all was mortal, or had best be so,
And so be done with. ‘Art,’ he would have said,
‘Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;’
And with a few profundities like that
He would have controverted and dismissed
The benefit of the Greeks. He had heard of them,
As he had heard of his aspiring soul—
Never to the perceptible advantage,
In his esteem, of either. ‘Faith,’ he said,
Or would have said if he had thought of it,
‘Lives in the same house with Philosophy,
Where the two feed on scraps and are forlorn
As orphans after war. He could see stars,
On a clear night, but he had not an eye
271
To see beyond them. He could hear spoken words,
But had no ear for silence when alone.
He could eat food of which he knew the savor,
But had no palate for the Bread of Life,
That human desperation, to his thinking,
Made famous long ago, having no other.
Now do you see? Do you begin to see?”
I told him that I did begin to see;
And I was nearer than I should have been
To laughing at his malign inclusiveness,
When I considered that, with all our speed,
We are not laughing yet at funerals.
I see him now as I could see him then,
And I see now that it was good for me,
As it was good for him, that I was quiet;
For Time’s eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft
Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him,
Or so I chose to fancy more than once
Before he told of Norcross. When the word
Of his release (he would have called it so)
Made half an inch of news, there were no tears
That are recorded. Women there may have been
To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing,
The few there were to mourn were not for love,
And were not lovely. Nothing of them, at least,
Was in the meagre legend that I gathered
Years after, when a chance of travel took me
So near the region of his nativity
That a few miles of leisure brought me there;
For there I found a friendly citizen
Who led me to his house among the trees
That were above a railroad and a river.
Square as a box and chillier than a tomb
It was indeed, to look at or to live in—
All which had I been told. “Ferguson died,”
The stranger said, “and then there was an auction.
I live here, but I’ve never yet been warm.
Remember him? Yes, I remember him.
I knew him—as a man may know a tree—
For twenty years. He may have held himself
A little high when he was here, but now …
Yes, I remember Ferguson. Oh, yes.”
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Others, I found, remembered Ferguson,
But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,#NFDB
1291:Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs,
The not-incurious in God's handiwork
(This man's-flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on earth a space
That puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul)
To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain,
Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term,
And aptest in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such:
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snakestonerarer still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)
And writeth now the twenty-second time.
My journeyings were brought to Jericho;
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art
Shall count a little labour unrepaid?
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land.
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumours of a marching hitherward:
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields
A viscid choler is observable
In tertians, I was nearly bold to say;
And falling-sickness hath a happier cure
Than our school wots of: there's a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;
Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his mind,
The Syrian runagate I trust this to?
His service payeth me a sublimate
Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.
Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,
Gather what most deserves, and give thee all
Or I might add, Judea's gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,
Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end.
Yet stay: my Syrian blinketh gratefully,
Protesteth his devotion is my price
Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal?
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a-writing first of all.
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!
For, be it this town's barrennessor else
The Man had something in the look of him
His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth.
So, pardon if(lest presently I lose
In the great press of novelty at hand
The care and pains this somehow stole from me)
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind,
Almost in sightfor, wilt thou have the truth?
The very man is gone from me but now,
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse.
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all!
'Tis but a case of maniasubinduced
By epilepsy, at the turning-point
Of trance prolonged unduly some three days:
When, by the exhibition of some drug
Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art
Unknown to me and which 'twere well to know,
The evil thing out-breaking all at once
Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,
But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide,
Making a clear house of it too suddenly,
The first conceit that entered might inscribe
Whatever it was minded on the wall
So plainly at that vantage, as it were,
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls
The just-returned and new-established soul
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart
That henceforth she will read or these or none.
And firstthe man's own firm conviction rests
That he was dead (in fact they buried him)
That he was dead and then restored to life
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe:
'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise.
"Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry.
Not so this figment!not, that such a fume,
Instead of giving way to time and health,
Should eat itself into the life of life,
As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all!
For see, how he takes up the after-life.
The manit is one Lazarus a Jew,
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,
The body's habit wholly laudable,
As much, indeed, beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.
Think, could we penetrate by any drug
And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,
And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep!
Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?
This grown man eyes the world now like a child.
Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,
Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep,
To bear my inquisition. While they spoke,
Now sharply, now with sorrow,told the case,
He listened not except I spoke to him,
But folded his two hands and let them talk,
Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool.
And that's a sample how his years must go.
Look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life,
Should find a treasure,can he use the same
With straitened habits and with tastes starved small,
And take at once to his impoverished brain
The sudden element that changes things,
That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand
And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust?
Is he not such an one as moves to mirth
Warily parsimonious, when no need,
Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times?
All prudent counsel as to what befits
The golden mean, is lost on such an one
The man's fantastic will is the man's law.
So herewe call the treasure knowledge, say,
Increased beyond the fleshly faculty
Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven:
The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds
'Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling facthe will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness,
(Far as I see) as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we too see not with his opened eyes.
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.
Should his child sicken unto death,why, look
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,
Or pretermission of the daily craft!
While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child
At play or in the school or laid asleep,
Will startle him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like. Demand
The reason why" `tis but a word," object
"A gesture"he regards thee as our lord
Who lived there in the pyramid alone
Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,
We both would unadvisedly recite
Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,
Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst
All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
Thou and the child have each a veil alike
Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both
Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match
Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!
He holds on firmly to some thread of life
(It is the life to lead perforcedly)
Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
And not along, this black thread through the blaze
"It should be" baulked by "here it cannot be."
And oft the man's soul springs into his face
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him "Rise" and he did rise.
Something, a word, a tick of the blood within
Admonishes: then back he sinks at once
To ashes, who was very fire before,
In sedulous recurrence to his trade
Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;
And studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows
God's secret, while he holds the thread of life.
Indeed the especial marking of the man
Is prone submission to the heavenly will
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.
'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last
For that same death which must restore his being
To equilibrium, body loosening soul
Divorced even now by premature full growth:
He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live
So long as God please, and just how God please.
He even seeketh not to please God more
(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.
Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach
The doctrine of his sect whate'er it be,
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do:
How can he give his neighbour the real ground,
His own conviction? Ardent as he is
Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old
"Be it as God please" reassureth him.
I probed the sore as thy disciple should:
"How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness
Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march
To stamp out like a little spark thy town,
Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?"
He merely looked with his large eyes on me.
The man is apathetic, you deduce?
Contrariwise, he loves both old and young,
Able and weak, affects the very brutes
And birdshow say I? flowers of the field
As a wise workman recognizes tools
In a master's workshop, loving what they make.
Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:
Only impatient, let him do his best,
At ignorance and carelessness and sin
An indignation which is promptly curbed:
As when in certain travels I have feigned
To be an ignoramus in our art
According to some preconceived design,
And happed to hear the land's practitioners,
Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance,
Prattle fantastically on disease,
Its cause and cureand I must hold my peace!
Thou wilt objectwhy have I not ere this
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,
Conferring with the frankness that befits?
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech
Perished in a tumult many years ago,
Accused,our learning's fate,of wizardry,
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule
And creed prodigious as described to me.
His death, which happened when the earthquake fell
(Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss
To occult learning in our lord the sage
Who lived there in the pyramid alone)
Was wrought by the mad peoplethat's their wont!
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,
To his tried virtue, for miraculous help
How could he stop the earthquake? That's their way!
The other imputations must be lies:
But take one, though I loathe to give it thee,
In mere respect for any good man's fame.
(And after all, our patient Lazarus
Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?
Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech
'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)
This man so cured regards the curer, then
AsGod forgive me! who but God himself,
Creator and sustainer of the world,
That came and dwelt in flesh on 't awhile!
'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself, in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus
Who saithbut why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!
Thy pardon for this long and tedious case,
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem
Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!
Nor I myself discern in what is writ
Good cause for the peculiar interest
And awe indeed this man has touched me with.
Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness
Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus:
I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold, and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
In this old sleepy town at unaware,
The man and I. I send thee what is writ.
Regard it as a chance, a matter risked
To this ambiguous Syrianhe may lose,
Or steal, or give it thee with equal good.
Jerusalem's repose shall make amends
For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine;
Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!
The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.
NOTES
Form:
unrhyming
1.
Karshish, the Arab physician, and his friend
Abib are the creatures of the poet's imagination\; the time
is some forty years after the raising of Lazarus (see note
on line 28 below). For the story of Lazarus, see John 11: 1--44.
The meaning of Karshish's name in Arabic is paraphrased
in "picker-up of learning's crumbs."
20-1.
Karshish numbers his regular letters to Abib to provide
a check on their arrival. This letter is the twenty-second\; in the
twenty-first he had brought the account of his journeyings up
to his arrival at Jericho.
28.
It was Titus who besieged and captured Jernsalem in
A.D. 70\; he was emperor, 79-81\; Vespasian, his father, was
emperor, 70-79 A.D.
36.
Bethany: "Bethany, the town of Mary and his sister Martha"
(John 11: 1).
42.
choler: in its original sense, bile. Browning has Karshish
think in terms of the old physiology of "humours." Karshish
hopes that he may have found a way of diagnosing fever from
the consistency of the blood when he phlebotomises the patient.
43.
tertians: fevers which recur every other day\; i.e. on every third
day in the inclusive Roman way of counting.
50.
sublimate: in old-fashioned chemistry, the name for compounds
made by heating bodies to a vapour and then allowing this to condense.
55.
gum-tragacanth: a gum produced by certain thorny shrubs in
Asia Minor and Persia.
57.
Porphyry: a sort of stone used for the manufacture of vases, etc.\;
here used by metonymy for the mortar made out of it.
58.
scalp-disease: undoubtedly alopicia (from which Chaucer's
Pardoner suffered), which has a connection with leprosy.
82.
Exhibition is the old term for "administration" of a remedy.
89.
conceit: here used in the early sense of "idea, concept, fancy."
96.
The whole passage from line 79 is Karshish's attempt to find an
explanation in terms of a mechanist psychology for the fixed idea in Lazarus' mind.
100.
Nazarene: Christ: see Matthew 2: 23.
103.
fume: used here as a derogatory term for Lazarus' idea that he has
been restored to life.
106.
saffron: a drug derived from a plant of the same name (Crocus
sativus), formerly much used both as a medicine and as a dye.
109.
sanguine: again part of the terminology of humours. The "sanguine"
type was not, like the "melancholic," given to delusions and attacks of
fancy--this makes Lazarus' case still more strange.
110.
laudable: another technical medical term here, suggesting perfect health.
146-47.
See lines 26-28 above and note.
177.
Greek fire: an explosive compound, the nearest approach to
gunpowder known to the ancients.
184.
To Lazarus, who now sees with a knowledge far beyond the human,
the spiritual or moral law is as clear and certain as the physical.
Compare A Death in the Desert, 251-298.
228.
affects: in the sense of "shows affection for."
251.
Karshish uses "prodigious" here in a derogatory sense.
252.
when the earthquake fell. "And behold the veil of the temple was
rent in twain from the top to the bottom\; and the earth did quake, and
the rocks were rent" (Matthew 27: 51).
265.
leech: old-fashioned word for physician.
304-11.
Compare the passage in Saul, 300-12.
~ Robert Browning, An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Kar
,#NFDB
1292:Epilogue
(THE GRAVEYARD OF SPOON RIVER. TWO VOICES ARE HEARD BEHIND A
SCREEN DECORATED WITH DIABOLICAL AND ANGELIC FIGURES IN VARIOUS
ALLEGORICAL RELATIONS. A FAINT LIGHT SHOWS DIMLY THROUGH THE
SCREEN AS IF IT WERE WOVEN OF LEAVES, BRANCHES AND SHADOWS.)
FIRST VOICE
A game of checkers?
SECOND VOICE
Well, I don't mind.
FIRST VOICE
I move the Will.
SECOND VOICE
You're playing it blind.
FIRST VOICE
Then here's the Soul.
SECOND VOICE
Checked by the Will.
FIRST VOICE
Eternal Good!
SECOND VOICE
And Eternal Ill.
FIRST VOICE
100
I haste for the King row.
SECOND VOICE
Save your breath.
FIRST VOICE
I was moving Life.
SECOND VOICE
You're checked by Death.
FIRST VOICE
Very good, here's Moses.
SECOND VOICE
And here's the Jew.
FIRST VOICE
My next move is Jesus.
SECOND VOICE
St. Paul for you!
FIRST VOICE
Yes, but St. Peter –
SECOND VOICE
You might have foreseen –
FIRST VOICE
You're in the King row --
101
SECOND VOICE
With Constantine!
FIRST VOICE
I'll go back to Athens.
SECOND VOICE
Well, here's the Persian.
FIRST VOICE
All right, the Bible.
SECOND VOICE
Pray now, what version?
FIRST VOICE
I take up Buddha.
SECOND VOICE
It never will work.
FIRST VOICE
From the corner Mahomet.
SECOND VOICE
I move the Turk.
FIRST VOICE
The game is tangled; where are we now?
SECOND VOICE
102
You're dreaming worlds. I'm in the King row.
Move as you will, if I can't wreck you
I'll thwart you, harry you, rout you, check you.
FIRST VOICE
I'm tired. I'll send for my Son to play.
I think he can beat you finally -SECOND VOICE
Eh?
FIRST VOICE
I must preside at the stars' convention.
SECOND VOICE
Very well, my lord, but I beg to mention
I'll give this game my direct attention.
FIRST VOICE
A game indeed! But Truth is my quest.
SECOND VOICE
Beaten, you walk away with a jest.
I strike the table, I scatter the checkers.
(A rattle of a falling table and checkers
flying over a floor.)
Aha! You armies and iron deckers,
Races and states in a cataclysm -Now for a day of atheism!
(The screen vanishes and BEELZEBUB steps forward carrying a trumpet, which
he blows faintly. Immediately LOKI and YOGARINDRA start up from the shadows
of night.)
103
BEELZEBUB
Good evening, Loki!
LOKI
The same to you!
BEELZEBUB
And Yogarindra!
YOGARINDRA
My greetings, too.
LOKI
Whence came you, comrade?
BEELZEBUB
From yonder screen.
YOGARINDRA
And what were you doing?
BEELZEBUB
Stirring His spleen.
LOKI
How did you do it?
BEELZEBUB
I made it rough
In a game of checkers.
LOKI
104
Good enough!
YOGARINDRA
I thought I heard the sounds of a battle.
BEELZEBUB
No doubt! I made the checkers rattle,
Turning the table over and strewing
The bits of wood like an army pursuing.
YOGARINDRA
I have a game! Let us make a man.
LOKI
My net is waiting him, if you can.
YOGARINDRA
And here's my mirror to fool him with -BEELZEBUB
Mystery, falsehood, creed and myth.
LOKI
But no one can mold him, friend, but you.
BEELZEBUB
Then to the sport without more ado.
YOGARINDRA
Hurry the work ere it grow to day.
BEELZEBUB
105
I set me to it. Where is the clay?
(He scrapes the earth with his hands and begins to model.)
BEELZEBUB
Out of the dust,
Out of the slime,
A little rust,
And a little lime.
Muscle and gristle,
Mucin, stone
Brayed with a pestle,
Fat and bone.
Out of the marshes,
Out of the vaults,
Matter crushes
Gas and salts.
What is this you call a mind,
Flitting, drifting, pale and blind,
Soul of the swamp that rides the wind?
Jack-o'-lantern, here you are!
Dream of heaven, pine for a star,
Chase your brothers to and fro,
Back to the swamp at last you'll go.
Hilloo! Hilloo!
THE VALLEY
Hilloo! Hilloo!
(Beelzebub in scraping up the earth turns out a skull.)
BEELZEBUB
Old one, old one.
Now ere I break you
Crush you and make you
Clay for my use,
Let me observe you:
You were a bold one
106
Flat at the dome of you,
Heavy the base of you,
False to the home of you,
Strong was the face of you,
Strange to all fears.
Yet did the hair of you
Hide what you were.
Now to re-nerve you -(He crushes the skull between his hands and mixes it with the clay.)
Now you are dust,
Limestone and rust.
I mold and I stir
And make you again.
THE VALLEY
Again? Again?
(In the same manner BEELZEBUB has fashioned several figures, standing them
against the trees.)
LOKI
Now for the breath of life. As I remember
You have done right to mold your creatures first,
And stand them up.
BEELZEBUB
From gravitation
I make the will.
YOGARINDRA
Out of sensation
Comes his ill. Out of my mirror
Springs his error.
Who was so cruel
To make him the slave
Of me the sorceress, you the knave,
And you the plotter to catch his thought,
Whatever he did, whatever he sought?
107
With a nature dual
Of will and mind,
A thing that sees, and a thing that's blind.
Come! to our dance! Something hated him
Made us over him, therefore fated him.
(They join hands and dance.)
LOKI
Passion, reason, custom, ruels,
Creeds of the churches, lore of the schools,
Taint in the blood and strength of soul.
Flesh too weak for the will's control;
Poverty, riches, pride of birth,
Wailing, laughter, over the earth,
Here I have you caught again,
Enter my web, ye sons of men.
YOGARINDRA
Look in my mirror! Isn't it real?
What do you think now, what do you feel?
Here is treasure of gold heaped up;
Here is wine in the festal cup.
Tendrils blossoming, turned to whips,
Love with her breasts and scarlet lips.
Breathe in their nostrils.
BEELZEBUB
Falsehood's breath,
Out of nothingness into death.
Out of the mold, out of the rocks,
Wonder, mockery, paradox!
Soaring spirit, groveling flesh,
Bait the trap, and spread the mesh.
Give him hunger, lure him with truth,
Give him the iris hopes of Youth.
Starve him, shame him, fling him down,
Whirled in the vortex of the town.
Break him, age him, till he curse
The idiot face of the universe.
108
Over and over we mix the clay, –
What was dust is alive to-day.
THE THREE
Thus is the hell-born tangle wound
Swiftly, swiftly round and round.
BEELEZEBUB
(Waving his trumpet.)
You live! Away!
ONE OF THE FIGURES
How strange and new!
I am I, and another, too.
ANOTHER FIGURE
I was a sun-dew's leaf, but now
What is this longing? -ANOTHER FIGURE
Earth below
I was a seedling magnet-tipped
Drawn down earth -ANOTHER FIGURE
And I was gripped
Electrons in a granite stone,
Now I think.
ANOTHER FIGURE
Oh, how alone!
ANOTHER FIGURE
109
My lips to thine. Through thee I find
Something alone by love divined!
BEELZEBUB
Begone! No, wait. I have bethought me, friends;
Let's give a play.
(He waves his trumpet.)
To yonder green rooms go.
(The figures disappear.)
YOGARINDRA
Oh, yes, a play! That's very well, I think,
But who will be the audience? I must throw
Illusion over all.
LOKI
And I must shift
The scenery, and tangle up the plot.
BEELZEBUB
Well, so you shall! Our audience shall some
From yonder graves.
(He blows his trumpet slightly louder than before. The scene changes. A stage
arises among the graves. The curtain is down, concealing the creatures just
created, illuminated halfway up by spectral lights. BEELZEBUB stands before the
curtain.)
BEELZEBUB
(A terrific blast of the trumpet.)
Who-o-o-o-o-o!
(Immediately there is a rustling as of the shells of grasshoppers stirred by a
wind; and hundreds of the dead, including those who have appeared in the
Anthology, hurry to the sound of the trumpet.)
110
A VOICE
Gabriel! Gabriel!
MANY VOICES
The Judgment day!
BEELZEBUB
Be quiet, if you please
At least until the stars fall and the moon.
MANY VOICES
Save us! Save us!
(Beelzebub extends his hands over the audience with a benedictory motion and
restores order.)
BEELZEBUB
Ladies and gentlemen, your kind attention
To my interpretation of the scene.
I rise to give your fancy comprehension,
And analyze the parts of the machine.
My mood is such that I would not deceive you,
Though still a liar and the father of it,
From judgment's frailty I would retrieve you,
Though falsehood is my art and though I love it.
Down in the habitations whence I rise,
The roots of human sorrow boundless spread.
Long have I watched them draw the strength that lies
In clay made richer by the rotting dead.
Here is a blossom, here a twisted stalk,
Here fruit that sourly withers ere its prime;
And here a growth that sprawls across the walk,
Food for the green worm, which it turns to slime.
The ruddy apple with a core of cork
Springs from a root which in a hollow dangles,
Not skillful husbandry nor laborious work
111
Can save the tree which lightning breaks and tangles.
Why does the bright nasturtium scarcely flower
But that those insects multiply and grow,
Which make it food, and in the very hour
In which the veined leaves and blossoms blow?
Why does a goodly tree, while fast maturing,
Turn crooked branches covered o'er with scale?
Why does the tree whose youth was not assuring
Prosper and bear while all its fellows fail?
I under earth see much. I know the soil.
I know where mold is heavy and where thin.
I see the stones that thwart the plowman's toil,
The crooked roots of what the priests call sin.
I know all secrets, even to the core,
What seedlings will be upas, pine or laurel;
It cannot change howe'er the field's worked o'er.
Man's what he is and that's the devil's moral.
So with the souls of the ensuing drama
They sprang from certain seed in certain earth.
Behold them in the devil's cyclorama,
Shown in their proper light for all they're worth.
Now to my task: I'll give an exhibition
Of mixing the ingredients of spirit.
(He waves his hand.)
Come, crucible, perform your magic mission,
Come, recreative fire, and hover near it!
I'll make a soul, or show how one is made.
(He waves his wand again. Parti-colored flames appear.)
This is the woman you shall see anon!
(A red flame appears.)
This hectic flame makes all the world afraid:
It was a soldier's scourge which ate the bone.
His daughter bore the lady of the action,
And died at thirty-nine of scrofula.
She-was a creature of a sweet attraction,
Whose sex-obsession no one ever saw.
(A purple flame appears.)
Lo! this denotes aristocratic strains
112
Back in the centuries of France's glory.
(A blue flame appears.)
And this the will that pulls against the chains
Her father strove until his hair was hoary.
Sorrow and failure made his nature cold,
He never loved the child whose woe is shown,
And hence her passion for the things which gold
Brings in this world of pride, and brings alone.
The human heart that's famished from its birth
Turns to the grosser treasures, that is plain.
Thus aspiration fallen fills the earth
With jungle growths of bitterness and pain.
Of Celtic, Gallic fire our heroine!
Courageous, cruel, passionate and proud.
False, vengeful, cunning, without fear o' sin.
A head that oft is bloody, but not bowed.
Now if she meet a man -- suppose our hero,
With whom her chemistry shall war yet mix,
As if she were her Borgia to his Nero,
'Twill look like one of Satan's little tricks!
However, it must be. The world's great garden
Is not all mine. I only sow the tares.
Wheat should be made immune, or else the Warden
Should stop their coming in the world's affairs.
But to our hero! Long ere he was born
I knew what would repel him and attract.
Such spirit mathematics, fig or thorn,
I can prognosticate before the fact.
(A yellow flame appears.)
This is a grandsire's treason in an orchard
Against a maid whose nature with his mated.
(Lurid flames appear.)
And this his memory distrait and tortured,
Which marked the child with hate because she hated.
Our heroine's grand dame was that maid's own cousin -But never this our man and woman knew.
The child, in time, of lovers had a dozen,
Then wed a gentleman upright and true.
And thus our hero had a double nature:
113
One half of him was bad, the other good.
The devil must exhaust his nomenclature
To make this puzzle rightly understood.
But when our hero and our heroine met
They were at once attracted, the repulsion
Was hidden under Passion, with her net
Which must enmesh you ere you feel revulsion.
The virus coursing in the soldier's blood,
The orchard's ghost, the unknown kinship 'twixt them,
Our hero's mother's lovers round them stood,
Shadows that smiled to see how Fate had fixed them.
This twain pledge vows and marry, that's the play.
And then the tragic features rise and deepen.
He is a tender husband. When away
The serpents from the orchard slyly creep in.
Our heroine, born of spirit none too loyal,
Picks fruit of knowledge -- leaves the tree of life.
Her fancy turns to France corrupt and royal,
Soon she forgets her duty as a wife.
You know the rest, so far as that's concerned,
She met exposure and her husband slew her.
He lost his reason, for the love she spurned.
He prized her as his own -- how slight he knew her.
(He waves a wand, showing a man in a prison cell.)
Now here he sits condemned to mount the gallows -He could not tell his story -- he is dumb.
Love, says your poets, is a grace that hallows,
I call it suffering and martyrdom.
The judge with pointed finger says, "You killed her."
Well, so he did -- but here's the explanation;
He could not give it. I, the drama-builder,
Show you the various truths and their relation.
(He waves his wand.)
Now, to begin. The curtain is ascending,
They meet at tea upon a flowery lawn.
Fair, is it not? How sweet their souls are blending -The author calls the play "Laocoon."
A VOICE
114
Only an earth dream.
ANOTHER VOICE
With which we are done.
A flash of a comet
Upon the earth stream.
ANOTHER VOICE
A dream twice removed,
A spectral confusion
Of earth's dread illusion.
A FAR VOICE
These are the ghosts
From the desolate coasts.
Would you go to them?
Only pursue them.
Whatever enshrined is
Within you is you.
In a place where no wind is,
Out of the damps,
Be ye as lamps.
Flame-like aspire,
To me alone true,
The Life and the Fire.
(BEELZEBUB, LOKI and YOGARINDRA vanish. The phantasmagoria fades out.
Where the dead seemed to have assembled, only heaps of leaves appear. There
is the light as of dawn. Voices of Spring.)
FIRST VOICE
The springtime is come, the winter departed,
She wakens from slumber and dances light-hearted.
The sun is returning,
We are done with alarms,
Earth lifts her face burning,
Held close in his arms.
The sun is an eagle
115
Who broods o'er his young,
The earth is his nursling
In whom he has flung
The life-flame in seed,
In blossom desire,
Till fire become life,
And life become fire.
SECOND VOICE
I slip and I vanish,
I baffle your eye;
I dive and I climb,
I change and I fly.
You have me, you lose me,
Who have me too well,
Now find me and use me -I am here in a cell.
THIRD VOICE
You are there in a cell?
Oh, now for a rod
With which to divine you -SECOND VOICE
Nay, child, I am God.
FOURTH VOICE
When the waking waters rise from their beds of snow, under the hill,
In little rooms of stone where they sleep when icicles reign,
The April breezes scurry through woodlands, saying
Awaken roots under cover of soil -- it is Spring again."
Then the sun exults, the moon is at peace, and voices
Call to the silver shadows to lift the flowers from their dreams.
And a longing, longing enters my heart of sorrow, my heart that rejoices
In the fleeting glimpse of a shining face, and her hair that gleams.
I arise and follow alone for hours the winding way by the river,
116
Hunting a vanishing light, and a solace for joy too deep.
Where do you lead me, wild one, on and on forever?
Over the hill, over the hill, and down to the meadows of sleep.
THE SUN
Over the soundless depths of space for a hundred million miles
Speeds the soul of me, silent thunder, struck from a harp of fire.
Before my eyes the planets wheel and a universe defiles,
I but a ruminant speck of dust upborne in a vast desire.
What is my universe that obeys me -- myself compelled to obey
A power that holds me and whirls me over a path that has no end?
And there are my children who call me great, the giver of life and day,
Myself a child who cry for life and know not whither I tend.
A million million suns above me, as if the curtain of night
Were hung before creation's flame, that shone through the weave of the cloth,
Each with its worlds and worlds and worlds crying upward for light,
For each is drawn in its course to what? -- as the candle draws the moth.
THE MILKY WAY
Orbits unending,
Life never ending,
Power without end.
A VOICE
Wouldst thou be lord,
Not peace but a sword.
Not heart's desire -Ever aspire.
Worship thy power,
Conquer thy hour,
Sleep not but strive,
So shalt thou live.
INFINITE DEPTHS
Infinite Law,
Infinite Life.
117
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
1293:IV - THE STUDY
FAUST MEPHISTOPHELES
FAUST
A knock? Come in! Again my quiet broken?
MEPHISTOPHELES
'Tis I!
FAUST
Come in!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Thrice must the words be spoken.
FAUST
Come in, then!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Thus thou pleasest me.
I hope we'll suit each other well;
For now, thy vapors to dispel,
I come, a squire of high degree,
In scarlet coat, with golden trimming,
A cloak in silken lustre swimming,
A tall cock's-feather in my hat,
A long, sharp sword for show or quarrel,
And I advise thee, brief and flat,
To don the self-same gay apparel,
That, from this den released, and free,
Life be at last revealed to thee!
FAUST
This life of earth, whatever my attire,
Would pain me in its wonted fashion.
Too old am I to play with passion;
Too young, to be without desire.
What from the world have I to gain?
Thou shalt abstainrenouncerefrain!
Such is the everlasting song
That in the ears of all men rings,
That unrelieved, our whole life long,
Each hour, in passing, hoarsely sings.
In very terror I at morn awake,
Upon the verge of bitter weeping,
To see the day of disappointment break,
To no one hope of minenot oneits promise keeping:
That even each joy's presentiment
With wilful cavil would diminish,
With grinning masks of life prevent
My mind its fairest work to finish!
Then, too, when night descends, how anxiously
Upon my couch of sleep I lay me:
There, also, comes no rest to me,
But some wild dream is sent to fray me.
The God that in my breast is owned
Can deeply stir the inner sources;
The God, above my powers enthroned,
He cannot change external forces.
So, by the burden of my days oppressed,
Death is desired, and Life a thing unblest!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And yet is never Death a wholly welcome guest.
FAUST
O fortunate, for whom, when victory glances,
The bloody laurels on the brow he bindeth!
Whom, after rapid, maddening dances,
In clasping maiden-arms he findeth!
O would that I, before that spirit-power,
Ravished and rapt from life, had sunken!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And yet, by some one, in that nightly hour,
A certain liquid was not drunken.
FAUST
Eavesdropping, ha! thy pleasure seems to be.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Omniscient am I not; yet much is known to me.
FAUST
Though some familiar tone, retrieving
My thoughts from torment, led me on,
And sweet, clear echoes came, deceiving
A faith bequea thed from Childhood's dawn,
Yet now I curse whate'er entices
And snares the soul with visions vain;
With dazzling cheats and dear devices
Confines it in this cave of pain!
Cursed be, at once, the high ambition
Wherewith the mind itself deludes!
Cursed be the glare of apparition
That on the finer sense intrudes!
Cursed be the lying dream's impression
Of name, and fame, and laurelled brow!
Cursed, all that flatters as possession,
As wife and child, as knave and plow!
Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures
To restless action spurs our fate!
Cursed when, for soft, indulgent leisures,
He lays for us the pillows straight!
Cursed be the vine's transcendent nectar,
The highest favor Love lets fall!
Cursed, also, Hope!cursed Faith, the spectre!
And cursed be Patience most of all!
CHORUS OF SPIRITS (invisible)
Woe! woe!
Thou hast it destroyed,
The beautiful world,
With powerful fist:
In ruin 'tis hurled,
By the blow of a demigod shattered!
The scattered
Fragments into the Void we carry,
Deploring
The beauty perished beyond restoring.
Mightier
For the children of men,
Brightlier
Build it again,
In thine own bosom build it anew!
Bid the new career
Commence,
With clearer sense,
And the new songs of cheer
Be sung thereto!
MEPHISTOPHELES
These are the small dependants
Who give me attendance.
Hear them, to deeds and passion
Counsel in shrewd old-fashion!
Into the world of strife,
Out of this lonely life
That of senses and sap has betrayed thee,
They would persuade thee.
This nursing of the pain forego thee,
That, like a vulture, feeds upon thy breast!
The worst society thou find'st will show thee
Thou art a man among the rest.
But 'tis not meant to thrust
Thee into the mob thou hatest!
I am not one of the greatest,
Yet, wilt thou to me entrust
Thy steps through life, I'll guide thee,
Will willingly walk beside thee,
Will serve thee at once and forever
With best endeavor,
And, if thou art satisfied,
Will as servant, slave, with thee abide.
FAUST
And what shall be my counter-service therefor?
MEPHISTOPHELES
The time is long: thou need'st not now insist.
FAUST
Nono! The Devil is an egotist,
And is not apt, without a why or wherefore,
"For God's sake," others to assist.
Speak thy conditions plain and clear!
With such a servant danger comes, I fear.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Here, an unwearied slave, I'll wear thy tether,
And to thine every nod obedient be:
When There again we come together,
Then shalt thou do the same for me.
FAUST
The There my scruples naught increases.
When thou hast dashed this world to pieces,
The other, then, its place may fill.
Here, on this earth, my pleasures have their sources;
Yon sun beholds my sorrows in his courses;
And when from these my life itself divorces,
Let happen all that can or will!
I'll hear no more: 'tis vain to ponder
If there we cherish love or hate,
Or, in the spheres we dream of yonder,
A High and Low our souls await.
MEPHISTOPHELES
In this sense, even, canst thou venture.
Come, bind thyself by prompt indenture,
And thou mine arts with joy shalt see:
What no man ever saw, I'll give to thee.
FAUST
Canst thou, poor Devil, give me whatsoever?
When was a human soul, in its supreme endeavor,
E'er understood by such as thou?
Yet, hast thou food which never satiates, now,
The restless, ruddy gold hast thou,
That runs, quicksilver-like, one's fingers through,
A game whose winnings no man ever knew,
A maid that, even from my breast,
Beckons my neighbor with her wanton glances,
And Honor's godlike zest,
The meteor that a moment dances,
Show me the fruits that, ere they're gathered, rot,
And trees that daily with new leafage clo the them!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Such a demand alarms me not:
Such treasures have I, and can show them.
But still the time may reach us, good my friend.
When peace we crave and more luxurious diet.
FAUST
When on an idler's bed I stretch myself in quiet.
There let, at once, my record end!
Canst thou with lying flattery rule me,
Until, self-pleased, myself I see,
Canst thou with rich enjoyment fool me,
Let that day be the last for me!
The bet I offer.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Done!
FAUST
And heartily!
When thus I hail the Moment flying:
"Ah, still delaythou art so fair!"
Then bind me in thy bonds undying,
My final ruin then declare!
Then let the death-bell chime the token.
Then art thou from thy service free!
The clock may stop, the hand be broken,
Then Time be finished unto me!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Consider well: my memory good is rated.
FAUST
Thou hast a perfect right thereto.
My powers I have not rashly estimated:
A slave am I, whate'er I do
If thine, or whose? 'tis needless to debate it.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Then at the Doctors'-banquet I, to-day,
Will as a servant wait behind thee.
But one thing more! Beyond all risk to bind thee,
Give me a line or two, I pray.
FAUST
Demand'st thou, Pedant, too, a document?
Hast never known a man, nor proved his word's intent?
Is't not enough, that what I speak to-day
Shall stand, with all my future days agreeing?
In all its tides sweeps not the world away,
And shall a promise bind my being?
Yet this delusion in our hearts we bear:
Who would himself therefrom deliver?
Blest he, whose bosom Truth makes pure and fair!
No sacrifice shall he repent of ever.
Nathless a parchment, writ and stamped with care,
A spectre is, which all to shun endeavor.
The word, alas! dies even in the pen,
And wax and leather keep the lordship then.
What wilt from me, Base Spirit, say?
Brass, marble, parchment, paper, clay?
The terms with graver, quill, or chisel, stated?
I freely leave the choice to thee.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Why heat thyself, thus instantly,
With eloquence exaggerated?
Each leaf for such a pact is good;
And to subscribe thy name thou'lt take a drop of blood.
FAUST
If thou therewith art fully satisfied,
So let us by the farce abide.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Blood is a juice of rarest quality.
FAUST
Fear not that I this pact shall seek to sever?
The promise that I make to thee
Is just the sum of my endeavor.
I have myself inflated all too high;
My proper place is thy estate:
The Mighty Spirit deigns me no reply,
And Nature shuts on me her gate.
The thread of Thought at last is broken,
And knowledge brings disgust unspoken.
Let us the sensual deeps explore,
To quench the fervors of glowing passion!
Let every marvel take form and fashion
Through the impervious veil it wore!
Plunge we in Time's tumultuous dance,
In the rush and roll of Circumstance!
Then may delight and distress,
And worry and success,
Alternately follow, as best they can:
Restless activity proves the man!
MEPHISTOPHELES
For you no bound, no term is set.
Whether you everywhere be trying,
Or snatch a rapid bliss in flying,
May it agree with you, what you get!
Only fall to, and show no timid balking.
FAUST
But thou hast heard, 'tis not of joy we're talking.
I take the wildering whirl, enjoyment's keenest pain,
Enamored hate, exhilarant disdain.
My bosom, of its thirst for knowledge sated,
Shall not, henceforth, from any pang be wrested,
And all of life for all mankind created
Shall be within mine inmost being tested:
The highest, lowest forms my soul shall borrow,
Shall heap upon itself their bliss and sorrow,
And thus, my own sole self to all their selves expanded,
I too, at last, shall with them all be stranded!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Believe me, who for many a thousand year
The same tough meat have chewed and tested,
That from the cradle to the bier
No man the ancient leaven has digested!
Trust one of us, this Whole supernal
Is made but for a God's delight!
He dwells in splendor single and eternal,
But us he thrusts in darkness, out of sight,
And you he dowers with Day and Night.
FAUST
Nay, but I will!
MEPHISTOPHELES
A good reply!
One only fear still needs repeating:
The art is long, the time is fleeting.
Then let thyself be taught, say I!
Go, league thyself with a poet,
Give the rein to his imagination,
Then wear the crown, and show it,
Of the qualities of his creation,
The courage of the lion's breed,
The wild stag's speed,
The Italian's fiery blood,
The North's firm fortitude!
Let him find for thee the secret tether
That binds the Noble and Mean together.
And teach thy pulses of youth and pleasure
To love by rule, and hate by measure!
I'd like, myself, such a one to see:
Sir Microcosm his name should be.
FAUST
What am I, then, if 'tis denied my part
The crown of all humanity to win me,
Whereto yearns every sense within me?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Why, on the whole, thou'rtwhat thou art.
Set wigs of million curls upon thy head, to raise thee,
Wear shoes an ell in height,the truth betrays thee,
And thou remainestwhat thou art.
FAUST
I feel, indeed, that I have made the treasure
Of human thought and knowledge mine, in vain;
And if I now sit down in restful leisure,
No fount of newer strength is in my brain:
I am no hair's-breadth more in height,
Nor nearer, to the Infinite,
MEPHISTOPHELES
Good Sir, you see the facts precisely
As they are seen by each and all.
We must arrange them now, more wisely,
Before the joys of life shall pall.
Why, Zounds! Both hands and feet are, truly
And head and virile forcesthine:
Yet all that I indulge in newly,
Is't thence less wholly mine?
If I've six stallions in my stall,
Are not their forces also lent me?
I speed along, completest man of all,
As though my legs were four-and-twenty.
Take hold, then! let reflection rest,
And plunge into the world with zest!
I say to thee, a speculative wight
Is like a beast on moorlands lean,
That round and round some fiend misleads to evil plight,
While all about lie pastures fresh and green.
FAUST
Then how shall we begin?
MEPHISTOPHELES
We'll try a wider sphere.
What place of martyrdom is here!
Is't life, I ask, is't even prudence,
To bore thyself and bore the students?
Let Neighbor Paunch to that attend!
Why plague thyself with threshing straw forever?
The best thou learnest, in the end
Thou dar'st not tell the youngstersnever!
I hear one's footsteps, hither steering.
FAUST
To see him now I have no heart.
MEPHISTOPHELES
So long the poor boy waits a hearing,
He must not unconsoled depart.
Thy cap and mantle straightway lend me!
I'll play the comedy with art.
(He disguises himself.)
My wits, be certain, will befriend me.
But fifteen minutes' time is all I need;
For our fine trip, meanwhile, prepare thyself with speed!
[Exit FAUST.
MEPHISTOPHELES
(In FAUST'S long mantle.)
Reason and Knowledge only thou despise,
The highest strength in man that lies!
Let but the Lying Spirit bind thee
With magic works and shows that blind thee,
And I shall have thee fast and sure!
Fate such a bold, untrammelled spirit gave him,
As forwards, onwards, ever must endure;
Whose over-hasty impulse drave him
Past earthly joys he might secure.
Dragged through the wildest life, will I enslave him,
Through flat and stale indifference;
With struggling, chilling, checking, so deprave him
That, to his hot, insatiate sense,
The dream of drink shall mock, but never lave him:
Refreshment shall his lips in vain implore
Had he not made himself the Devil's, naught could save him,
Still were he lost forevermore!
(A STUDENT enters.)
STUDENT
A short time, only, am I here,
And come, devoted and sincere,
To greet and know the man of fame,
Whom men to me with reverence name.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Your courtesy doth flatter me:
You see a man, as others be.
Have you, perchance, elsewhere begun?
STUDENT
Receive me now, I pray, as one
Who comes to you with courage good,
Somewhat of cash, and healthy blood:
My mother was hardly willing to let me;
But knowledge worth having I fain would get me.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Then you have reached the right place now.
STUDENT
I'd like to leave it, I must avow;
I find these walls, these vaulted spaces
Are anything but pleasant places.
Tis all so cramped and close and mean;
One sees no tree, no glimpse of green,
And when the lecture-halls receive me,
Seeing, hearing, and thinking leave me.
MEPHISTOPHELES
All that depends on habitude.
So from its mother's breasts a child
At first, reluctant, takes its food,
But soon to seek them is beguiled.
Thus, at the breasts of Wisdom clinging,
Thou'lt find each day a greater rapture bringing.
STUDENT
I'll hang thereon with joy, and freely drain them;
But tell me, pray, the proper means to gain them.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Explain, before you further speak,
The special faculty you seek.
STUDENT
I crave the highest erudition;
And fain would make my acquisition
All that there is in Earth and Heaven,
In Nature and in Science too.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Here is the genuine path for you;
Yet strict attention must be given.
STUDENT
Body and soul thereon I'll wreak;
Yet, truly, I've some inclination
On summer holidays to seek
A little freedom and recreation.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Use well your time! It flies so swiftly from us;
But time through order may be won, I promise.
So, Friend (my views to briefly sum),
First, the collegium logicum.
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots 'twere laced,
And thus, to graver paces brought,
'Twill plod along the path of thought,
Instead of shooting here and there,
A will-o'-the-wisp in murky air.
Days will be spent to bid you know,
What once you did at a single blow,
Like eating and drinking, free and strong,
That one, two, three! thereto belong.
Truly the fabric of mental fleece
Resembles a weaver's masterpiece,
Where a thousand threads one treadle throws,
Where fly the shuttles hither and thither.
Unseen the threads are knit together.
And an infinite combination grows.
Then, the philosopher steps in
And shows, no otherwise it could have been:
The first was so, the second so,
Therefore the third and fourth are so;
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been.
The scholars are everywhere believers,
But never succeed in being weavers.
He who would study organic existence,
First drives out the soul with rigid persistence;
Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class,
But the spiritual link is lost, alas!
Encheiresin natures, this Chemistry names,
Nor knows how herself she banters and blames!
STUDENT
I cannot understand you quite.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Your mind will shortly be set aright,
When you have learned, all things reducing,
To classify them for your using.
STUDENT
I feel as stupid, from all you've said,
As if a mill-wheel whirled in my head!
MEPHISTOPHELES
And afterfirst and foremost dutyOf
Metaphysics learn the use and beauty!
See that you most profoundly gain
What does not suit the human brain!
A splendid word to serve, you'll find
For what goes inor won't go inyour mind.
But first, at least this half a year,
To order rigidly adhere;
Five hours a day, you understand,
And when the clock strikes, be on hand!
Prepare beforeh and for your part
With paragraphs all got by heart,
So you can better watch, and look
That naught is said but what is in the book:
Yet in thy writing as unwearied be,
As did the Holy Ghost dictate to thee!
STUDENT
No need to tell me twice to do it!
I think, how useful 'tis to write;
For what one has, in black and white,
One carries home and then goes through it.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Yet choose thyself a faculty!
STUDENT
I cannot reconcile myself to Jurisprudence.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Nor can I therefore greatly blame you students:
I know what science this has come to be.
All rights and laws are still transmitted
Like an eternal sickness of the race,
From generation unto generation fitted,
And shifted round from place to place.
Reason becomes a sham, Beneficence a worry:
Thou art a grandchild, therefore woe to thee!
The right born with us, ours in verity,
This to consider, there's, alas! no hurry.
STUDENT
My own disgust is streng thened by your speech:
O lucky he, whom you shall teach!
I've almost for Theology decided.
MEPHISTOPHELES
I should not wish to see you here misguided:
For, as regards this science, let me hint
'Tis very hard to shun the false direction;
There's so much secret poison lurking in 't,
So like the medicine, it baffles your detection.
Hear, therefore, one alone, for that is best, in sooth,
And simply take your master's words for truth.
On words let your attention centre!
Then through the safest gate you'll enter
The temple-halls of Certainty.
STUDENT
Yet in the word must some idea be.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Of course! But only shun too over-sharp a tension,
For just where fails the comprehension,
A word steps promptly in as deputy.
With words 'tis excellent disputing;
Systems to words 'tis easy suiting;
On words 'tis excellent believing;
No word can ever lose a jot from thieving.
STUDENT
Pardon! With many questions I detain you.
Yet must I trouble you again.
Of Medicine I still would fain
Hear one strong word that might explain you.
Three years is but a little space.
And, God! who can the field embrace?
If one some index could be shown,
'Twere easier groping forward, truly.
MEPHISTOPHELES (aside)
I'm tired enough of this dry tone,
Must play the Devil again, and fully.
(Aloud)
To grasp the spirit of Medicine is easy:
Learn of the great and little world your fill,
To let it go at last, so please ye,
Just as God will!
In vain that through the realms of science you may drift;
Each one learns onlyjust what learn he can:
Yet he who grasps the Moment's gift,
He is the proper man.
Well-made you are, 'tis not to be denied,
The rest a bold address will win you;
If you but in yourself confide,
At once confide all others in you.
To lead the women, learn the special feeling!
Their everlasting aches and groans,
In thousand tones,
Have all one source, one mode of healing;
And if your acts are half discreet,
You'll always have them at your feet.
A title first must draw and interest them,
And show that yours all other arts exceeds;
Then, as a greeting, you are free to touch and test them,
While, thus to do, for years another pleads.
You press and count the pulse's dances,
And then, with burning sidelong glances,
You clasp the swelling hips, to see
If tightly laced her corsets be.
STUDENT
That's better, now! The How and Where, one sees.
MEPHISTOPHELES
My worthy friend, gray are all theories,
And green alone Life's golden tree.
STUDENT
I swear to you, 'tis like a dream to me.
Might I again presume, with trust unbounded,
To hear your wisdom thoroughly expounded?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Most willingly, to what extent I may.
STUDENT
I cannot really go away:
Allow me that my album first I reach you,
Grant me this favor, I beseech you!
MEPHISTOPHELES
Assuredly.
(He writes, and returns the book.)
STUDENT (reads)
Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum.
(Closes the book with reverence, and withdraws)
MEPHISTOPHELES
Follow the ancient text, and the snake thou wast ordered to trample!
With all thy likeness to God, thou'lt yet be a sorry example!
(FAUST enters.)
FAUST
Now, whither shall we go?
MEPHISTOPHELES
As best it pleases thee.
The little world, and then the great, we'll see.
With what delight, what profit winning,
Shalt thou sponge through the term beginning!
FAUST
Yet with the flowing beard I wear,
Both ease and grace will fail me there.
The attempt, indeed, were a futile strife;
I never could learn the ways of life.
I feel so small before others, and thence
Should always find embarrassments.
MEPHISTOPHELES
My friend, thou soon shalt lose all such misgiving:
Be thou but self-possessed, thou hast the art of living!
FAUST
How shall we leave the house, and start?
Where hast thou servant, coach and horses?
MEPHISTOPHELES
We'll spread this cloak with proper art,
Then through the air direct our courses.
But only, on so bold a flight,
Be sure to have thy luggage light.
A little burning air, which I shall soon prepare us,
Above the earth will nimbly bear us,
And, if we're light, we'll travel swift and clear:
I gratulate thee on thy new career!
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, THE STUDY (The Compact)
,#NFDB
1294: Ahana
Ahana
(Ahana, the Dawn of God, descends on the world where amid the strife and trouble of mortality the Hunters of Joy, the
Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power are toiling up the slopes or waiting in the valleys. As she stands on the mountains of the East, voices of the Hunters of Joy are the first to greet her.)
Vision delightful alone on the hills whom the silences cover,
Closer yet lean to mortality; human, stoop to thy lover.
Wonderful, gold like a moon in the square of the sun where thou strayest
Glimmers thy face amid crystal purities; mighty thou playest
Sole on the peaks of the world, unafraid of thy loneliness. Glances
Leap from thee down to us, dream-seas and light-falls and magical trances;
Sun-drops flake from thy eyes and the heart's caverns packed are with pleasure
Strange like a song without words or the dance of a measureless measure.
Tread through the edges of dawn, over twilight's grey-lidded margin;
Heal earth's unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin.
Children of Time whose spirits came down from eternity, seizing
Joys that escape us, yoked by our hearts to a labour unceasing,
Earth-bound, torn with our longings, our life is a brief incompleteness.
Thou hast the stars to sport with, the winds run like bees to thy sweetness.
Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth? Hast thou ended
All desirable things in a stillness lone and unfriended?
Only is calm so sweet? is our close tranquillity only?
Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.
Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre.
Art thou not weary of only the stars in their solemn muster,
Sky-hung the chill bare plateaus and peaks where the eagle rejoices
In the inhuman height of his nesting, solitude's voices
Making the heart of the silence lonelier? strong and untiring,
Deaf with the cry of the waterfall, lonely the pine lives aspiring.
Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
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Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other, -
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth's passion to quiver its peace into rapture.
Marry, O lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-born fire!
Out of thy greatness draw close to the breast of our mortal desire!
Is he thy master, Rudra the mighty, Shiva ascetic?
Has he denied thee his world? In his dance that they tell of, ecstatic,
Slaying, creating, calm in the midst of the movement and madness,
Stole there no rhythm of an earthly joy and a mortal sadness?
Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate; joy's delicate blossom
Sleeps in thy lids of delight; all Nature hides in thy bosom
Claiming her children unborn and the food of her love and her laughter.
Is he the first? was there none then before him? shall none come after?
He who denies and his blows beat down on our hearts like a hammer's,
He whose calm is the silent reply to our passion and clamours!
Is not there deity greater here new-born in a noble
Labour and sorrow and struggle than stilled into rapture immobile?
Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven's that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying.
Earth has her godheads; the Tritons sway on the toss of the billows,
Emerald locks of the Nereids stream on their foam-crested pillows,
Dryads peer out from the branches, Naiads glance up from the waters;
High are her flame-points of joy and the gods are ensnared by her daughters.
Artemis calls as she flees through the glades and the breezes pursue her;
Cypris laughs in her isles where the ocean-winds linger to woo her.
Here thou shalt meet amid beauty forgotten the dance of the Graces;
Night shall be haunted for ever with strange and delicate faces.
Music is here of the fife and the flute and the lyre and the timbal,
Wind in the forests, bees in the grove, - spring's ardent cymbal
Thrilling, the cry of the cuckoo; the nightingale sings in the branches,
Human laughter is heard and the cattle low in the ranches.
Frankly and sweetly she gives to her children the bliss of her body,
Breath of her lips and the green of her garments, rain-pourings heady
Tossed from her cloud-carried beaker of tempest, oceans and streamlets,
Dawn and the mountain-air, corn-fields and vineyards, pastures and hamlets,
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Tangles of sunbeams asleep, mooned dream-depths, twilight's shadows,
Taste and scent and the fruits of her trees and the flowers of her meadows,
Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture.
Still must they mutter that all here is vision and passing appearance,
Magic of Maya with falsehood and pain for its only inherence.
One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning, -
He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning.
One eternal, Time an illusion, life a brief error!
One eternal, Master of heaven - and of hell and its terror!
Spirit of silence and purity rapt and aloof from creation, -
Dreaming through aeons unreal his splendid and empty formation!
Spirit all-wise in omnipotence shaping a world but to break it, -
Pushed by what mood of a moment, the breath of what fancy to make it?
None is there great but the eternal and lonely, the unique and unmated,
Bliss lives alone with the self-pure, the single, the forever-uncreated.
Truths? or thought's structures bridging the vacancy mute and unsounded
Facing the soul when it turns from the stress of the figures around it?
Solely we see here a world self-made by some indwelling Glory
Building with forms and events its strange and magnificent story.
Yet at the last has not all been solved and unwisdom demolished,
Myth cast out and all dreams of the soul, and all worship abolished?
All now is changed, the reverse of the coin has been shown to us; Reason
Waking, detecting the hoax of the spirit, at last has arisen,
Captured the Truth and built round her its bars that she may not skedaddle,
Gallop again with the bit in her teeth and with Fancy in the saddle.
Now have the wise men discovered that all is the craft of a superMagic of Chance and a movement of Void and inconscient Stupor.
Chance by a wonderful accident ever her ripples expanding
Out of a gaseous circle of Nothingness, implacably extending
Freak upon freak, repeating rigidly marvels on marvels,
Making a world out of Nothing, started on the arc of her travels.
Nothingness born into feeling and action dies back to Nothing.
Sea of a vague electricity, romping through space-curves and clothing
Strangely the Void with a semblance of Matter, painfully flowered
Into this giant phenomenon universe. Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
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Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and mechanic.
Once by an accident queer but quite natural, provable, simple,
Out of blind Space-Nought lashed into life, wearing Mind as its wimple,
Dupe of a figment of consciousness, doped with behaviour and feature,
Matter deluded claimed to be spirit and sentient creature.
All the high dreams man has dreamed and his hopes and his deeds, his soul's greatness
Are but a food-seeking animal's acts with the mind for their witness, -
Mind a machine for the flickers of thought, Matter's logic unpremissed, -
Are but a singular fireworks, chemistry lacking the chemist,
Matter's nervous display; the heart's passion, the sorrow and burning
Fire of delight and sweet ecstasy, love and its fathomless yearning,
Boundless spiritual impulses making us one with world-being,
Outbursts of vision opening doors to a limitless seeing,
Gases and glands and the genes and the nerves and the brain-cells have done it,
Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet,
Studied the stars and discovered the brain and the laws of its thinking,
Sculptured the cave-temple, reared the cathedral, infinity drinking
Wrought manufacturing God and the soul for the uplift of Nature, -
Science, philosophy, head of his mystical chemical stature,
Music and painting revealing the godhead in sound and in colour,
Acts of the hero, thoughts of the thinker, search of the scholar,
All the magnificent planning, all the inquiry and wonder
Only a trick of the atom, its marvellous magical blunder.
Who can believe it? Something or someone, a Force or a Spirit
Conscious, creative, wonderful shaped out a world to inherit
Here for the beings born from its vast universal existence, -
Fields of surprise and adventure, vistas of light-haunted distance,
Play-routes of wisdom and vision and struggle and rapture and sorrow,
Sailing in Time through the straits of today to the sea of tomorrow.
Worlds and their wonders, suns and their flamings, earth and her nations,
Voyages endless of Mind through the surge of its fate-tossed creations,
Star upon star throbbing out in the silence of infinite spaces,
Species on species, bodies on bodies, faces on faces,
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Souls without number crossing through Time towards eternity, aeons
Crowding on aeons, loving and battle, dirges and paeans,
Thoughts ever leaping, hopes ever yearning, lives ever streaming,
Millions and millions on trek through the days with their doings and dreaming,
Herds of the Sun who move on at the cry of the radiant drover, -
Countless, surviving the death of the centuries, lost to recover,
Finished, but only to begin again, who is its tireless creator,
Cause or the force of its driving, its thinker or formless dictator?
Surely no senseless Vacancy made it, surely 'twas fashioned
By an almighty One million-ecstasied, thousand-passioned.
Self-made? then by what self from which thought could arise and emotion,
Waves that well up to the surface, born from what mysteried ocean?
Nature alone is the fountain. But what is she? Is she not only
Figure and name for what none understands, though all feel, or a lonely
Word in which all finds expression, spirit-heights, dumb work of Matter, -
Vague designation filling the gaps of our thought with its clatter?
Power without vision that blunders in man into thinking and sinning?
Rigid, too vast inexhaustible mystery void of a meaning?
Energy blindly devising, unconsciously ranging in order?
Chance in the march of a cosmic Insanity crossing the border
Out of the eternal silence to thought and its strangeness and splendour?
Consciousness born by an accident until an accident end her?
Nought else is she but the power of the Spirit who dwells in her ever,
Witness and cause of her workings, lord of her pauseless endeavour.
All things she knows, though she seems here unseeing; even in her slumber
Wondrous her works are, design and its magic and magic of number,
Plan of her mighty cosmic geometry, balance of forces,
Universe flung beyond universe, law of the stars and their courses,
Cosmos atomic stretched to the scale of the Infinite's measure.
Mute in the trance of the Eternal she sleeps with the stone and the azure.
Now she awakes; for life has just stirred in her, stretching first blindly
Outward for sense and its pleasure and pain and the gifts of the kindly
Mother of all, for her light and her air and the sap from her flowing,
Pleasure of bloom and inconscient beauty, pleasure of growing.
Then into mind she arises; heart's yearning awakes and reflection
Looks out on struggle and harmony, - conscious, her will of selection
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Studies her works and illumines the choice of her way; last, slowly
Inward she turns and stares at the Spirit within her. Holy
Silences brood in her heart and she feels in her ardent recesses
Passions too great for her frame, on her body immortal caresses.
Into the calm of the Greatness beyond her she enters, burning
Now with a light beyond thought's, towards Self and Infinity turning,
Turned to beatitude, turned to eternity, spiritual grandeur,
Power without limit, ecstasy imperishable, shadowless splendour.
Then to her mortals come, flashing, thoughts that are wisdom's fire-kernel;
Leaping her flame-sweeps of might and delight and of vision supernal
Kindle the word and the act, the Divine and humanity fusing,
Illuminations, trance-seeds of silence, flowers of musing, -
Light of our being that yet has to be, its glory and glimmer
Smiting with sunrise the soul of the sage and the heart of the dreamer.
Or is it all but a vain expectation and effort ungrounded,
Wings without body, sight without object, waters unsounded,
Hue of a shimmer that steals through some secret celestial portal,
Glory of a gleam or a dream in an animal brief-lived and mortal?
Are they not radiances native to heaven's more fortunate ether,
Won when we part from this body, this temporal house of a nether
Mystery of life lived in vain? Upon earth is the glory forbidden,
Nature for ever accursed, frustrated, grief-vexed, fate-ridden?
Half of the glory she dreamed of forgotten or lost in earth's darkness,
Half of it mangled and missed as the death-wheels whirl in their starkness,
Cast out from heaven a goddess rebellious with mind for her mirror,
Cursed with desire and self-will and doomed to self-torture and error,
Came she to birth then with God for her enemy? Were we created
He unwilling or sleeping? did someone transgress the fated
Limits he set, outwitting God? In the too hasty vision
Marred of some demiurge filmed there the blur of a fatal misprision,
Making a world that revolves on itself in a circuit of failure,
Aeons of striving, death for a recompense, Time for our tenure?
Out of him rather she came and for him are her cry and her labour;
Deep are her roots in him; topless she climbs, to his greatness a neighbour.
All is himself in her, brooding in darkness, mounting the sun-ways;
Air-flight to him is man's journey with heaven and earth for the runways.
He is the witness and doer, he is the loved and the lover,
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He the eternal Truth that we look in ourselves to discover.
All is his travel in Time; it is he who turns history's pages,
Act and event and result are the trail that he leaves through the ages;
Form and idea are his signs and number and sound are his symbols,
Music and singing, the word and its rhythm are Divinity's cymbals,
Thunder and surge are the drums of his marching. Through us, with urges
Self-ward, form-bound, mute, motionless, slowly inevitably emerges
Vast as the cosmos, minute as the atom, the Spirit eternal.
Often the gusts of his force illumining moments diurnal
Flame into speech and idea; transcendences splendid and subtle
Suddenly shoot through the weft of our lives from a magical shuttle;
Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers.
Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher;
Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature.
Out of his Void we arise to a mighty and shining existence,
Out of Inconscience, tearing the black Mask's giant resistance;
Waves of his consciousness well from him into these bodies in Nature,
Forms are put round him; his oneness, divided by mind's nomenclature,
High on the summits of being ponders immobile and single,
Penetrates atom and cell as the tide drenches sand-grain and shingle.
Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover
Veiled in the depths which the foam of our thoughts and our life's billows cover,
Heaves like the sea in its waves; like heaven with its star-fires it gazes
Watching the world and its works. Interned in the finite's mazes,
Still shall he rise to his vast superconscience, we with him climbing;
Truth of man's thought with the truth of God's spirit faultlessly timing,
That which was mortal shall enter immortality's golden precincts,
Hushed breath of ecstasy, honey of lotus depths where the bee sinks,
Timeless expanses too still for the voice of the hours to inveigle,
Spaces of spirit too vast for the flight of the God-bearing eagle, -
Enter the Splendour that broods now unseen on us, deity invading,
Sight without error, light without shadow, beauty unfading,
Infinite largeness, rapture eternal, love none can sever,
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Life, not this death-play, but a power God-driven and blissful for ever.
"No," cry the wise, "for a circle was traced, there was pyloned a limit
Only we escape through dream's thin passages. None can disclaim it;
All things created are made by their borders, sketched out and coded;
Vain is the passion to divinise manhood, humanise godhead.
None can exceed himself; even to find oneself hard for our search is:
Only we see as in night by a lustre of flickering torches.
To be content with our measure, our space is the law of our living.
All of thyself to thy manhood and Nature and Circumstance giving,
Be what thou must be or be what thou canst be, one hour in an era.
Knowing the truth of thy days, shun the light of ideal and chimera:
Curb heart's impatience, bind thy desires down, pause from self-vexing."
Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler risking
All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the stable
Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the table?
Always the world is expanding and growing from minute to minute;
Playing the march of the adventure of Time with our lives for her spinet
Maya or Nature, the wonderful Mother, strikes out surprising
Strains of the spirit disprisoned; creation heavenward rising
Wrestles with Time and Space and the Unknown to give form to the Formless.
Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race.
All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle.
Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. Guided by Powers that surround and precede us
Fearful and faltering steps are our perishing efforts that lead us
On through the rooms of the finite till open the limitless spaces
And we can look into all-seeing eyes and imperishable faces.
But we must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles:
Caught by the moments, held back from the spirit's timelessness, slowly
Wading in shallows we take not the sea-plunge vastly and wholly.
Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle.
Here in this world that knows not its morrow, this reason that stumbles
Onward from error to truth and from truth back to error while crumbles
All that it fashioned, after the passion and travail are ended,
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After the sacrifice offered when the will and the strength are expended,
Nothing is done but to have laid down one stone of a road without issue,
Added our quota of evil and good to an ambiguous tissue.
Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining.
In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven.
Ignorance darkens, death and inconscience gape to absorb us;
Thick and persistent the Night confronts us, its hunger enormous
Swallowing our work and our lives. Our love and our knowledge squandered
Lie like a treasure refused and trod down on the ways where we wandered;
All we have done is effaced by the thousands behind us arriving.
Trapped in a round fixed for ever circles our thought and our living.
Fiercely the gods in their jealousy strike down the heads that have neighboured
Even for a moment their skies; in the sands our achievements are gravured.
Yet survives bliss in the rhythm of our heart-beats, yet is there wonder,
Beauty's immortal delight, and the seals of the mystery sunder.
Honied a thousand whispers come, in the birds, in the breezes,
Moonlight, the voices of streams; with a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure.
Passionate we seek for him everywhere, yearn for some sign of him, calling,
Scanning the dust for his footprints, praying and stumbling and falling;
Nothing is found and no answer comes from the masks that are passing.
Memories linger, lines from the past like a half-faded tracing.
He has passed on into silence wearing his luminous mantle.
Out of the melodied distance a laugh rings pure-toned, infantile,
Sole reminder that he is, last signal recalling his presence.
There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy's altars.
Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders.
Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
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Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther.
These too were magic of Maya, smiles of the marvellous Mother.
Oh, but the cruelty! oh, but the empty pain we go rueing!
Edges of opposite sweetness, calls to a closer pursuing.
All that we meet is a symbol and gateway; cryptic intention
Lurks in a common appearance, smiles from a casual mention:
Opposites hide in each other; in the laughter of Nature is danger,
Glory and greatness their embryos form in the womb of her anger.
Why are we terrified? wherefore cry out and draw back from the smiting -
Blows from the hands of a lover to direr exactions exciting,
Fiery points of his play! Was he Rudra only the mighty?
Whose were the whispers of sweetness, whose were the murmurs of pity?
Something opposes our grasp on the light and the sweetness and power,
Something within us, something without us, trap-door or tower,
Nature's gap in our being - or hinge! That device could we vanquish,
Once could we clasp him and hold, his joy we could never relinquish.
Then we could not be denied, for our might would be single and flawless.
Sons of the Eternal, sovereigns of Nature absolute and lawless,
Termlessly our souls would possess as he now enjoys and possesses,
Termlessly probe the delight of his laughter's lurking recesses,
Chasing its trail to the apex of sweetness and secrecy. Treasured
Close to the beats of Eternity's heart in a greatness unmeasured,
Locked into a miracle and mystery of Light we would live in him, - seated
Deep in his core of beatitude ceaselessly by Nature repeated,
Careless of Time, with no fear of an end, with no need for endeavour
Caught by his ecstasy dwell in a rapture enduring for ever.
What was the garden he built when the stars were first set in their places,
Soul and Nature together mid streams and in cloudless spaces
Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision,
Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division.
Though He who made all said, "It is good; I have fashioned perfection,"
"No, there is evil," someone whispered, "'tis screened from detection."
Wisest he of the beasts of the field, one cunning and creeping;
"See it," he said, "be wise; you shall be as the gods are, unsleeping,
They who know all." And they ate. The roots of our being were shaken;
Hatred and weeping and wrath at once trampled a world overtaken,
Terror and fleeing and anguish and shame and desires unsated;
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Cruelty stalked like a lion; Revenge and her brood were created.
Out to the desert he drove the rebellious. Flaming behind them
Streamed out the sword of his wrath and it followed leaping to find them,
Stabbing at random. The pure and the evil, the strong and the tempted,
All are confounded in punishment; justly is no one exempted.
Virtuous? yes, there are many, but who is there innocent? Toiling
Therefore we seek, but find not that Eden. Planting and spoiling,
"This is the garden," we say, "lo, the trees and this is the river."
Vainly redeemers came, not one has availed to deliver.
Never can Nature go back to her careless and childlike beginning,
Laugh of the babe and the song of the wheel in its delicate spinning,
Smile of the sun upon flowers and earth's beauty, life without labour
Plucking the fruits of the soil and rejoicing in cottage and arbour.
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp hymeneal.
Was it not he once in Brindavan? Woods divine to our yearning,
Memorable always! O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning,
Grasses his herds have grazed and crushed by his feet in the dancing,
Yamuna flowing with song, through the greenness always advancing,
You unforgotten remind; for his flute with its sweetness ensnaring
Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring
Hales us out naked and absolute, out to his woodlands eternal,
Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal,
And we go stumbling, maddened and thrilled to his dreadful embraces,
Slaves of his rapture to Brindavan crowded with amorous faces,
Luminous kine in the green glades seated, soft-eyed gazing,
Flowers on the branches distressing us, moonbeams unearthly amazing,
Yamuna flowing before us, laughing low with her voices,
Brindavan arching o'er us where Shyama sports and rejoices.
Inly the miracle trembles repeated; mist-walls are broken
Hiding that country of God and we look on the wonderful token,
Clasp the beautiful body of the Eternal; his flute-call of yearning
Cries in our breast with its blissful anguish for ever returning;
Life flows past us with passionate voices, a heavenly river,
All our being goes back as a bride of his bliss to the Giver.
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Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting,
Gaze on its mighty Companion; the load of mortality casting,
Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander
Thrilling body and soul and its endless felicity squander;
All world-sorrow is finished, the cry of the parting is over;
Ecstasy laughs in our veins, in our heart is the heart of the Lover.
As when a stream from a highl and plateau green mid the mountains
Draws through broad lakes of delight the gracious sweep of its fountains,
Life from its heaven of desire comes down to the toil of the earth-ways;
Streaming through mire it pours still the mystical joy of its birthplace,
Green of its banks and the green of its trees and the hues of the flower.
Something of child-heart beauty, something of greatness and power,
Dwell with it still in its early torrent laughter and brightness,
Call in the youth of its floods and the voice of the wideness and whiteness.
But in its course are set darkness and fall and the spirit's ordeal.
Hating its narrowness, forced by an ardour to see all and be all,
Dashed on the inconscient rocks and straining through mud, over gravel,
Flows, like an ardent prisoner bound to the scenes of his travail,
Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart's toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow.
Out of the sun-rays and moon-rays, the winds' wing-glimmer and revel,
Out of the star-fields of wonder, down to earth's danger and evil
Headlong cast with a stridulant thunder, the doom-ways descending,
Shuddering below into sunless depths, across chasms unending,
Baulked of the might of its waters, a thread in a mountainous vastness,
Parcelled and scanted it hurries as if storming a Titan fastness,
Carving the hills with a sullen and lonely gigantic labour.
Hurled into strangling ravines it escapes with a leap and a quaver,
Breaks from the channels of hiding it grooves out and chisels and twistens,
Angry, afraid, white, foaming. A stony and monstrous resistance
Meets it piling up stubborn limits. Afflicted the river
Treasures a scattered sunbeam, moans for a god to deliver,
Longing to lapse through the plain's green felicity, yearning to widen
Joined to the ocean's shoreless eternity far-off and hidden.
High on the cliffs the Great Ones are watching, the Mighty and Deathless,
Soaring and plunging the roadway of the Gods climbs uplifted and breathless;
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Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us.
Ignorant, circled with death and the abyss, we have dreamed of a human
Paradise made from the mind of a man, from the heart of a woman,
Dreamed of the Isles of the Blest in a light of perpetual summer,
Dreamed of the joy of an earthly life with no pain for incomer.
Never, we said, can these waters from heaven be lost in the marshes,
Cease in the sands of the desert, die where the simoom parches;
Plains are beyond, there are hamlets and fields where the river rejoices
Pacing once more with a quiet step and with amical voices:
Bright amid woodlands red with the berries and cool with the breezes
Glimmer the leaves; all night long the heart of the nightingale eases
Sweetly its burden of pity and sorrow. There amid flowers
We shall take pleasure in arbours delightful, leng thening the hours,
Time for our servitor waiting our fancy through moments unhasting,
Under the cloudless blue of those skies of tranquillity resting,
Lying on beds of lilies, hearing the bells of the cattle
Tinkle, and drink red wine of life and go forth to the battle,
Fight and unwounded return to our beautiful home by the waters,
Fruit of our joy rear tall strong sons and radiant daughters.
Then shall the Virgins of Light come down to us clad in clear raiment
Woven from sunbeam and moonbeam and lightnings, limitless payment
Bring of our toil and our sorrow, carrying life-giving garlands
Plucked by the fountains of Paradise, bring from imperishable star-lands
Hymn-words of wisdom, visions of beauty, heaven-fruit ruddy,
Wine-cups of ecstasy sending the soul like a stream through the body.
Fate shall not know; if her spies come down to our beautiful valley,
They shall grow drunk with its grapes and wander in woodl and and alley.
There leaps the anger of Rudra? there will his lightnings immortal
Circle around with their red eye of cruelty stabbing the portal?
Fearless is there life's play; I shall sport with my dove from his highlands,
Drinking her laughter of bliss like a god in my Grecian islands.
Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle.
These are but dreams and the truth shall be greater. Heaven made woman!
Flower of beatitude! living shape of the bliss of the Brahman!
Art thou not she who shall bring into life and time the Eternal?
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Body of the summer of the Gods, a sweetness virginal, vernal,
Breathes from thy soul into Nature; Love sits dreaming in thy bosom,
Wisdom gazes from thy eyes, thy breasts of God-rapture are the blossom.
If but the joy of thy feet once could touch our spaces smiting
Earth with a ray from the Unknown, on the world's heart heaven's script writing,
All then would change into harmony and beauty, Time's doors shudder
Swinging wide on their hinges into Eternity, other
Voices than earth's would be fire in our speech and make deathless our thinking.
One who is hidden in Light would grow visible, multitudes linking,
Lyres of a single ecstasy, throbs of the one heart beating,
Wonderful bodies and souls in the spirit's identity meeting
Even as stars in sky-vastness know their kindred in grandeur.
Yet may it be that although in the hands of our destiny stands sure
Fixed to its hour the Decree of the Advent, still it is fated
Only when kindling earth's bodies a mightier Soul is created.
Far-off the gold and the greatness, the rapture too splendid and dire.
Are not the ages too young? too low in our hearts burns the fire.
Bringest thou only a gleam on the summits, a cry in the distance,
Seen by the eyes that are wakened, heard by a spirit that listens?
Form of the formless All-Beautiful, lodestar of Nature's aspirance,
Music of prelude giving a voice to the ineffable Silence,
First white dawn of the God-Light cast on these creatures that perish,
Word-key of a divine and eternal truth for mortals to cherish,
Come! let thy sweetness and force be a breath in the breast of the future
Making the god-ways alive, immortality's golden-red suture:
Deep in our lives there shall work out a honeyed celestial leaven,
Bliss shall grow native to being and earth be a kin-soil to heaven.
Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy beauty enamour.
Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the dawn-moment's glamour,
Forcing the heart of the Midnight where slumber and secrecy linger,
Guardians of Mystery, touching her bosom with thy luminous finger,
Daughter of Heaven, break through to me moonlike, mystic and gleaming;
Tread through the margins of twilight, cross over borders of dreaming.
Vision delightful alone on the peaks whom the silences cover,
Vision of bliss, stoop down to mortality, lean to thy lover.
Ahana
491
AHANA
Voice of the sensuous mortal, heart of eternal longing,
Thou who hast lived as in walls, thy soul with thy senses wronging!
But I descend at last. Fickle and terrible, sweet and deceiving,
Poison and nectar one has dispensed to thee, luring thee, leaving.
We two together shall capture the flute and the player relentless.
Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with the flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. But I come and midnight shall sunder.
Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends and with thunder
Filling the spaces Strength, the Angel, bears on his bosom
Joy to thy arms. Thou shalt look on her face like a child's or a blossom,
Innocent, free as in Eden of old, not afraid of her playing,
When thy desires I have seized and devoured like a lioness preying.
Thou shalt not suffer always nor cry to me lured and forsaken:
I have a snare for his footsteps, I have a chain for him taken.
Come then to Brindavan, soul of the joyous; faster and faster
Follow the dance I shall teach thee with Shyama for slave and for master.
Follow the notes of the flute with a soul aware and exulting;
Trample Delight that submits and crouch to a sweetness insulting.
Then shalt thou know what the dance meant, fathom the song and the singer,
Hear behind thunder its rhymes, touched by lightning thrill to his finger,
Brindavan's rustle shalt understand and Yamuna's laughter,
Take thy place in the Ras1 and thy share of the ecstasy after.
1 The dance-round of Krishna with the cowherdesses in the moonlit groves of Brindavan, type of the dance of Divine Delight with the souls of men liberated in the world of
Bliss secret within us.
Poems from Manuscripts
Circa 1912 - 1913
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Ahana
,#NFDB
25 Integral Yoga
14 Occultism
11 Poetry
8 Psychology
8 Fiction
8 Christianity
6 Integral Theory
4 Yoga
4 Philosophy
2 Science
1 Theosophy
1 Philsophy
1 Hinduism
1 Alchemy
12 The Mother
11 Sri Aurobindo
8 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
8 Nolini Kanta Gupta
7 H P Lovecraft
7 Carl Jung
7 Aleister Crowley
5 Walt Whitman
5 Satprem
3 Swami Vivekananda
3 Plato
7 Lovecraft - Poems
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Phenomenon of Man
5 Whitman - Poems
5 Liber ABA
5 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
4 Mysterium Coniunctionis
3 Questions And Answers 1954
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
2 The Synthesis Of Yoga
2 The Practice of Psycho therapy
2 The Future of Man
2 Talks
2 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
2 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
2 Magick Without Tears
2 Essays Divine And Human
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Collected Poems
2 Agenda Vol 04
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
When planning to visit a foreign country, the wise traveler will first familiarize himself with its language. In studying music, Chemistry or calculus, a specific terminology is essential to the understanding of each subject. So a new set of symbols is necessary when undertaking a study of the Universe, whether within or without. The Qabalah provides such a set in unexcelled fashion.
But the Qabalah is more. It also lays the foundation on which rests another archaic science- Magic. Not to be confused with the conjurer's sleight-of-hand, Magic has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." Dion Fortune qualifies this nicely with an added clause, "changes in consciousness."
0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe someone much more intelligent, much smarter than me would find the work easier; but he would probably have more difficulties insideno such difficulties here! But outside For example, the chemical discovery of the structure of Matter would seem to be sufficient to serve as a base for true knowledge to act on Matter.3 And maybe those scientists, those who have discovered and experimented with the structure of Matter, would have no difficulty. But the field of the greatest difficulty is the medical field, the therapeutic field: their science is still ABSOLUTELY contrary to the true knowledge. And when it comes to the bodys equilibrium They know anatomy, they even know a little (not very, very much) a little about the bodys Chemistry, they know all kinds of things that the common man doesnt, on the strength of which they make dogmatic assertions and send you packing like an ignorant fool. All this business about the bodys workingshow much do they know? Naturally, when you ask them, But why is it like that? they reply, Oh, why? I have no idea.
And their way of telling you, Thats how things are and they cannot be otherwise! But if you tell them, Your experience is ultimately based on statistics, but your statistics are useless, they cover such a limited field of experience that they are worthless there is also all that you dont know, then they feel sorry for you.
0 1963-07-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo said somewhere that miraculous realizations do not last (they do occur, but they dont last), and that transformation alone will effect a lasting changenow I understand! Because some people happen, for some reason or other (a moment or a flash, or for a particular purpose), to receive the Force: all at once the Force comes, goes through them and acts, producing a fantastic result, but it doesnt recur. It cannot recur, because its like a combination of circumstances, nothing else. Its only when a modest work of this kind, a work of local transformation, so to speak, is completed and when there is the FULL consciousness with the FULL mastery of how to use the Force without anything interfering, that it will be like a Chemistry experiment you have learned to perform correctly: you can repeat it at will every time its necessary.
Thats the period of work under way. Very interesting.
0 1964-09-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a domain in which disease and cure no longer exist, but only disorder, confusion, and harmony, organization. A domain in which everything, but everything that takes place in the body works in that way, and necessarily, first of all, everything that involves the functioning of the organs themselves (disorder in the organs themselves). And there, there is a whole way of seeing things that leads you very close to the Truth. There remain only the diseases that come from outside, like diseases that are contagious through germs, microbes, bacilli, all that business, viruses thats still under the aspect of attacks from adverse forces, its another plane of action. But there is a point where it all meets. I would like, oh, I would very much like to discuss certain things or certain details of the bodys functioning and organization with a man who thoroughly knows anatomy, biology, physical and bodily Chemistryall those things thoroughly and who UNDERSTANDS, who is ready to understand that all those things are a projection of other forces, subtler forces; who is able to feel things as I feel them in my own body. That would be very interesting.2
(silence)
--
Mother is led to carry out all kinds of experiments in her body for the work of Transformation. One of them consists in receiving or taking upon oneself every possible disorder for several hours, several days or several minutes, in one's body, in order to act on them, and, consequently, to act on disorders of the same nature in the worldor on THE Disorder. Mother is thus constantly led to work on the meeting point between the subtle forces behind and the bodily or material mechanisms. In her body it is an uncommon Chemistry that takes place, the subtle elements of which she knows better than the gross ones.
***
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us leave the domain, the domain of inorganic matter for a while and turn to another set of facts, those of organic matter, of life and its manifestation. The biological domain is a freak in the midst of what apears to be a rigidly mechanistic material universe. The laws of life are not the laws of matter, very often one contravenes the other. The two converging lenses of the two eyes do not make the image twice brighter than the one produced by a single lens. What is this alchemy that forms the equation 1=1 (we might as well put it as 1+1=1)? Again, a living wholea cellfissured and divided tends to live and grow whollyin each fragment. In life we have thus another strange equation: part=whole (although in the mathematics of infinity such an equation is a normal phenomenon). The body (of a warm-blooded animal) maintaining a constant temperature whether it is at the Pole or at the Equator is a standing miracle which baffles mere physics and Chemistry. Thirdly, life is immortal the law of entropy (of irrevocably diminishing energy) that governs the fate of matter does not seem to hold good here. The original life-cells are carried over physically from generation to generation and there is no end to the continuity of the series, if allowed to run its normal course. Material energy also, it is said, is indestructible; it is never destroyed, but changes form only. But the scientific conception of material energy puts a limit to its course, it proceeds, if we are to believe thermodynamics, towards a dead equilibrium there is no such thing as "perpetual movement" in the field of matter.
Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws purporting to govern the physical bases of life claim recognition, but they stand on precarious grounds. The laws of natural selection, of heredity or genetics are applicable within a very restricted frame of facts. The variety of material substances revolves upon the gamut of 92 elements based upon 4 or 5 ultimate types of electric unitand that is sufficient to make us wonder. But the variety in life-play is simply incalculablefrom the amoeba or virus cell to man, what a bewildering kaleidoscope and each individual in each group is unique in its way! The few chromosomes that seem to be the basis of all diversity do not explain the mystery the mystery becomes doubly mysterious: how does a tiny seed contain the thing that is to become a banyan tree, how does a speck of plasma bring forth from within an object of Hamletian dimensions! What then is this energy or substance of life welling out irrepressively into multitudinous forms and modes? The chemical elements composing an organic body do not wholly exhaust its composition; there is something else besides. At least in one field, the life element has received recognition and been given an independent name and existence. I am obviously referring to the life element in food-stuff which has been called vitamin.
07.21 - On Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Formations are of many kinds. A formation is made for a particular work. When the work is done, the formation too dissolves. But it is a huge and complex subject. You cannot learn the whole of Chemistry in one hour.
I shall tell you another story in this connection, for it has an occult bearing.
07.22 - Mysticism and Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Occultism is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science, altogether a science. I always compare occultism with Chemistry or physics; for occult knowledge is very much like scientific knowledge, only science deals with material objects and forces, while occultism deals with invisible entities and energies, their potentials of combination and association. And as by your chemical or physical knowledge you control material phenomena, in the same way by the occult knowledge you control subtle phenomena, make them active and effective. The procedure also is quite scientific. It is to be learnt exactly as you do a science. It is not a matter of feeling or emotion: it is nothing vague or uncertain. You must work as in a laboratory. You have to learn the laws of action and reaction and apply them. Only there are not many people to teach you. Also it is not without danger. There are in this field combinations as explosive as any chemical combination.
It is a thing, however, that can be learnt. But one must have the aptitude. If you have the power latent in you, you can develop it by practice; but if you have not, you can try for 50 years, it will come to nothing. Everybody cannot have the occult power; it is as if you said that everybody in the world could be a musician or a painter or a poet. There are people who can and there are those who cannot. Usually, if you are interested in the subject, unless it is a mere idle curiosity, it is a sign that you have the gift. You then try. But, as I say, it is to be done with great precaution.
07.45 - Specialisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have, for example, several subjects to learn at school. Well, learn as many as possible. If you study at home, read as many varieties as possible. I know you are usually asked and advised to follow a different way. You are to take as few subjects as possible and specialise. Yes, that is the general ideal: specialisation, to be an expert in one thing. If you wish to be a good philosopher, read philosophy only; if you wish to be a good chemist, do only Chemistry; and even you should concentrate upon only one problem or thesis in philosophy or Chemistry. In sports you are asked to do the same. Choose one item and fix your attention upon that alone. If you want to be a good tennis player, think of tennis alone. However, I am not of that opinion. My experience is different. I believe, there are general faculties in man which he should acquire and cultivate more than specialise himself. Of course, if it is your ambition to be a Monsieur or Madame Curie who wanted to discover one particular thing, to find out a new mystery of a definite kind, then you have to concentrate upon the one thing in view. But even then, once the object is gained, you can turn very well to other things. Besides, it is not an impossibility in the midst of the one-pointed pursuit to find occasions and opportunities to be interested in other pursuits.
From my childhood I have been hearing of the same lesson; I am afraid it was taught also in the days of our fathers and grandfa thers and great grandfa thers, namely, that if you wish to be successful in something you must do that only and nothing else. I was rebuked very much because I was busy with many different things at the same time. I was told I would be in the end good for nothing. I was studying, I was painting, I was doing music and many other things. I was repeatedly warned that my painting would be worthless, my music would be worthless, my studies would be incomplete and defective if I had my way. Perhaps it was true; but I found that my way, too, had its advantagesprecisely the advantages I was speaking of at the outset, namely, it widens and enriches the mind and consciousness, makes it supple and flexible, gives it a spontaneous power to understand and handle anything new presented to it. If, however, I had wanted to become an executant of the first order and play in concerts, then of course I would have had to restrict myself. Or in painting if my aim had been to be one of the great artists of the age, I could have done only that and nothing else. One understands the position very well, but it is only a point of view. I do not see why I should become the greatest musician or the greatest painter. It seems to me to be nothing but vanity.
100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
trick; it is really the same principle that Chemistry is using inasmuch as the
tetrahedra represent the way that atoms cohere. Thus we discover synergy to be
operative in a very important way in Chemistry and in all the composition of the
Universe. Universe as a whole is behaving in a way that is completely unpredicted
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
4. Absorption, through that expression which is seen in all whirling spheres of atomic matter at whichever surface in the sphere corresponds to the point called in a planet the North Pole. Some idea of the intention that I seek to convey may be grasped by a study of the atom as portrayed in Babbitt's "Principles of Light and Colour," and later in Mrs. Besant's "Occult Chemistry." This depression is produced by radiations which proceed counter to the rotations of the sphere and pass down from the north southwards to a midway point. From there they tend to increase the latent heat, to produce added momentum and to give specific quality according to the source from which the radiation comes. This absorption of extra-spheroidal emanation is the secret of the dependence of one sphere upon another, and has its correspondence in the cycling of a ray through any plane sphere. Every atom, though termed spheroidal, is more accurately a sphere slightly depressed at one location, [156] that location being the place through which flows the force which animates the matter of the sphere. This is true of all spheres, from the solar down to the atom of matter that we call the cell in the body physical. Through the depression in the physical atom flows the vitalising force from without. Every atom is both positive and negative; it is receptive or negative where the inflowing force is concerned, and positive or radiatory where its own emanations are concerned, and in connection with its effect upon its environment.
This can be predicated likewise of the entire ring-pass-not of the solar system in relation to its cosmic environment. Force flows into the solar system from three directions via three channels:
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be _better than this_, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. But, says one, you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads? I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not _play_ life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly _live_ it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any thing is professed and practised but the art of life;to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study Chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.
Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the _poor_ student studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
recognised by physical Chemistry. To begin with, at the very
bottom there is a still unresolved simplicity, luminous in nature
--
and a ' Chemistry ' of the heavens inevitably extend the story of
the atoms ?
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Modern conceptions of mathematics, Chemistry, and physics are sheer paradox to the" plain man" who thinks of matter, for example, as something that he can knock up against. There appears to be no doubt nowadays that the ultimate nature of Science in any of its branches will be purely abstract, almost of a
Qabalistic character one might say, even though it may never be officially denominated the Qabalah. It is natural and proper to represent the Cosmos or any part of it, or its
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
In order to meet another objection, which may be raised by certain people who have some psychic experience, let it at once be admitted that there are shorter and simpler ways, and that there are persons who have acquired knowledge of the phenomena of birth and death through personal vision, without first going through all that has here been described. There are, in fact, people with considerable psychic gifts who need but a slight impulse in order to find themselves already developed. But they are the exceptions, and the methods described above are safer and apply equally to all. It is possible to acquire some knowledge of Chemistry in an exceptional way, but if you wish to become a chemist you must follow the recognized and reliable course.
An error fraught with serious consequences would ensue if it were assumed that the desired result could be reached more easily if the grain of seed or the plant mentioned above were merely imagined, were merely pictured in the imagination. This might lead to results, but not so surely
1.03 - Hieroglypics Life and Language Necessarily Symbolic, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"But why? Why all this elaborate symbolism? Why not say straight out what you mean? Surely the subject is difficult enough in any case must you put on a mask to make it clear? I know you well enough by now to be sure that you will not fob me off with any Holy-Willie nonsense about the ineffable, about human language being inadequate to reveal such Mysteries, about the necessity of constructing a new language to explain a new system of thought; of course I know that this had to be done in the case of Chemistry, of higher mathematics, indeed of almost all technical subjects; but I feel that you have some other, deeper explanation in reserve.
"After all, most of what I am seeking to learn from you has been familiar to many of the great minds of humanity for many centuries. Indeed, the Qabalah is a special language, and that is old enough; there is not much new material to fit into that structure. But why did they, in the first place, resort to this symbolic jargon?"
1.03 - THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
respectively involve, inorganic and organic Chemistry are only
and can only be two inseparable facets of one and the same
1.04 - KAI VALYA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
means. All of you know that Chemistry originally began as
alchemy; men went in search of the philsophers stone, and
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
cated elements, successively created by the working of Chemistry
and of Life. At the present time I can see no more satisfactory so-
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
O NE of the several difficulties encountered in pre- senting a new scheme or a new interpretation of philosophy is the popular prejudice against new terminology. It is conceivable that objections will be raised against the Hebrew Alphabet and the terms utilized by the Qabalah by people who may overlook the fact that in the study of Astronomy, Physics, or Chemistry, for example, a completely new nomenclature must be mastered.
Even commerce uses a whole system of words and terms meaningless without a knowledge of commercial methods and procedure. The terminology used by the Qabalah is so employed for several reasons.
1.04 - THE STUDY (The Compact), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
Encheiresin natures, this Chemistry names,
Nor knows how herself she banters and blames!
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
Gaias ability to regulate the Earths climate and Chemistry,
and if we continue to do it we are in danger of extinction.
1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
"Why should we look into the character and personality of a teacher? We have only to judge of what he says, and take that up." This is not right. If a man wants to teach me something of dynamics, or Chemistry, or any other physical science, he may be anything he likes, because what the physical sciences require is merely an intellectual equipment; but in the spiritual sciences it is impossible from first to last that there can be any spiritual light in the soul that is impure. What religion can an impure man teach? The sine qua non of acquiring spiritual truth for one's self or for imparting it to others is the purity of heart and soul. A vision of God or a glimpse of the beyond never comes until the soul is pure.
Hence with the teacher of religion we must see first what he is, and then what he says. He must be perfectly pure, and then alone comes the value of his words, because he is only then the true "transmitter". What can he transmit if he has not spiritual power in himself? There must be the worthy vibration of spirituality in the mind of the teacher, so that it may be sympathetically conveyed to the mind of the taught. The function of the teacher is indeed an affair of the transference of something, and not one of mere stimulation of the existing intellectual or other faculties in the taught. Something real and appreciable as an influence comes from the teacher and goes to the taught. Therefore the teacher must be pure.
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange Chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
generally as the precursor of modern Chemistry was in fact a twenty-centuries-long endeavour to
understand the transformations of matter. The alchemical matter, however, was not the matter of
--
If you read the history of the development of Chemistry and particularly of physics, you will see that
even... exact natural sciences [such as Chemistry and physics] could not, and still cannot, avoid basing
their thought systems on certain hypotheses. In classical physics, up to the end of the 18th century, one
--
not least by example. This extension of the theories of sympathetic magic to the domain of Chemistry
meant that alchemy became increasingly rife with (primarily imagistic) speculation regarding the nature of
--
endeavor was Chemistry and its staggering discoveries. The emotional dynamism of alchemy is largely
explained by a premonition of these then unheard-of-possibilities. However barren of useful or even
--
Multhauf, Robert P. (1967). The origins of Chemistry. London: Oldbourne.
Nader, A., McNally, R.J., & Wiegartz, P.S. (1996). Implicit memory bias for threat in posttraumatic stress
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
way for science. Alchemy leads up to Chemistry.
The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or
1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
ecules of organic Chemistry, and still more the living cellular com-
posites, have existed without any defined position, like wandering
--
of Chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the so-
cial sphere. This accounts for the tendency which has been insuf-
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
" To-day one phenomenon after another which was at one time attri buted to * vital force ' is being traced to the action of the ordinary processes of physics and Chemistry.
Although the problem is still far from solution, it is becom- ing increasingly likely that what specially distinguishes the matter of living bodies is the presence not of a ' vital force ', but of the quite commonplace element carbon. ... If this is so, life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. ... So far nothing is known to account for its very special capacity for binding other atoms together. The carbon atom consists of six electrons revolving around the appropriate central nucleus. . . ."
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Adept has literary capacity, or, perhaps, skill in several languages ; can paint somewhat, and has a know- ledge of Chemistry ? How do these attainments help his purpose, or that of mankind whom he has sworn to help ?
He was killed as a snake in seons gone by ; stoned under
1.09 - A System of Vedic Psychology, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The successes of European science have cast the shadow of their authority & prestige over the speculations of European scholarship; for European thought is, in appearance, a serried army marching to world-conquest and we who undergo the yoke of its tyranny, we, who paralysed by that fascination and overborne by that domination, have almost lost the faculty of thinking for ourselves, receive without distinction all its camp followers or irregular volunteers as authorities to whom we must needs submit.We reflect in our secondh and opinions the weak parts of European thought equally with the strong; we do not distinguish between those of its ideas which eternal Truth has ratified and those which have merely by their ingenuity and probability captivated for a short season the human imagination. The greater part of the discoveries of European Science (its discoveries, not its intellectual generalisations) belong to the first category; the greater part of the conclusions of European scholarship to the second. The best European thought has itself no illusions on this score. One of the greatest of European scholars & foremost of European thinkers, Ernest Renan, after commencing his researches in Comparative Philology with the most golden & extravagant hopes, was compelled at the close of a life of earnest & serious labour, to sum up the chief preoccupation of his days in a formula of measured disparagement,petty conjectural sciences. In other words, no sciences at all; for a science built upon conjectures is as much an impossibility & a contradiction in terms as a house built upon water. Renans own writings bear eloquent testimony to the truth of his final verdict; those which sum up his scholastic research, read now like a mass of learned crudity, even the best of them no longer authoritative or valid; those which express the substance or shades of his lifes thinking are of an imperishable beauty & value. The general sentiment of European Science agrees with the experience of Renan and even shoots beyond it; in the vocabulary of German scientists the word Philologe, philologist, bears a sadly disparaging and contemptuous significance & so great is the sense among serious thinkers of the bankruptcy of Comparative Philology that many deny even the possibility of an etymological Science. There is no doubt an element of exaggeration in some of these views; but it is true that Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology, ethnology, anthropology and their kindred sciences are largely a mass of conjectures,shifting intellectual quagmires in which we can find no sure treading. Only the airy wings of an ingenious imagination can bear us up on that shimmering surface and delude us with the idea that it is the soil which supports our movement & not the wings. There is a meagre but sound substratum of truth which will disengage itself some day from the conjectural rubbish; but the present stage of these conjectural sciences is no better but rather worse than the state of European Chemistry in the days of Paracelsus.But we in India are under the spell of European philology; we are taken by its ingenuity, audacity & self-confidence, an ingenuity which is capable of giving a plausibility to the absurd and an appearance of body to the unsubstantial, an audacity which does not hesitate to erect the most imposing theories on a few tags of disconnected facts, a confidence which even the constant change of its own opinions cannot disconcert. Moreover, our natural disposition is to the intellectuality of the scholar; verbal ingenuities, recondite explanations, far-fetched glosses have long had a weight with us which the discontinuity of our old scientific activities and disciplined experimental methods of reaching subjective truth has exaggerated and our excessive addiction to mere verbal metaphysics strongly confirmed. It is not surprising that educated India should have tacitly or expressly accepted even in subjects of such supreme importance to us as the real significance of the Vedas and Upanishads, the half patronising, half contemptuous views of the European scholar.
What are those views? They represent the Veda to us as a mass of naturalistic, ritualistic & astrological conceits, allegories & metaphors, crude & savage in the substance of its thought but more artificial & ingenious in its particular ideas & fancies than the most artificial, allegorical or Alexandrian poetry to be found in the worlds literaturea strange incoherent & gaudy jumble unparalleled by the early literature of any other nation,the result of a queer psychological mixture of an early savage with a modern astronomer & comparative mythologist.
1.12 - Independence, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The Yogis claim that these powers can be gained by chemical means. All of you know that Chemistry originally began as alchemy; men went in search of the philosopher's stone and elixirs of life, and so forth. In India there was a sect called the Rsyanas. Their idea was that ideality, knowledge, spirituality, and religion were all very right, but that the body was the only instrument by which to attain to all these. If the body came to an end every now and again, it would take so much more time to attain to the goal. For instance, a man wants to practice Yoga, or wants to become spiritual. Before he has advanced very far he dies. Then he takes another body and begins again, then dies, and so on. In this way much time will be lost in dying and being born again. If the body could be made strong and perfect, so that it would get rid of birth and death, we should have so much more time to become spiritual. So these Rasayanas say, first make the body very strong. They claim that this body can be made immortal. Their idea is that if the mind manufactures the body, and if it be true that each mind is only one outlet to the infinite energy, there should be no limit to each outlet getting any amount of power from outside. Why is it impossible to keep our bodies all the time? We have to manufacture all the bodies that we ever have. As soon as this body dies, we shall have to manufacture another. If we can do that, why cannot we do it just here and now, without getting out of the present body? The theory is perfectly correct. If it is possible that we live after death, and make other bodies, why is it impossible that we should have the power of making bodies here, without entirely dissolving this body, simply changing it continually? They also thought that in mercury and in sulphur was hidden the most wonderful power, and that by certain preparations of these a man could keep the body as long as he liked. Others believed that certain drugs could bring powers, such as flying through the air. Many of the most wonderful medicines of the present day we owe to the Rasayanas, notably the use of metals in medicine. Certain sects of Yogis claim that many of their principal teachers are still living in their old bodies. Patanjali, the great authority on Yoga, does not deny this.
The power of words. There are certain sacred words called Mantras, which have power, when repeated under proper conditions, produce these extraordinary powers. We are living in the midst of such a mass of miracles, day and night, that we do not think anything of them. There is no limit to man's power, the power of words and the power of mind.
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
There exists in India a secret knowledge based upon sounds and the differences of vibratory modes found on different planes of consciousness. If we pronounce the sound OM, for example, we clearly feel its vibrations enveloping the head centers, while the sound RAM affects the navel center. And since each of our centers of consciousness is in direct contact with a plane, we can, by the repetition of certain sounds (japa), come into contact with the corresponding plane of consciousness.200 This is the basis of an entire spiritual discipline, called "tantric" because it originates from sacred texts known as Tantra. The basic or essential sounds that have the power to establish the contact are called mantras. The mantras, usually secret and given to the disciple by his Guru,201 are of all kinds (there are many levels within each plane of consciousness), and may serve the most contradictory purposes. By combining certain sounds, one can at the lower levels of consciousness generally at the vital level come in contact with the corresponding forces and acquire many strange powers: some mantras can cause death (in five minutes, with violent vomiting), some mantras can strike with precision a particular part or organ of the body, some mantras can cure, some mantras can start a fire, protect, or cast spells. This type of magic, or Chemistry of vibrations, derives simply from a conscious handling of the lower vibrations. But there is a higher magic, which also derives from handling vibrations, on higher planes of consciousness. This is poetry, music, the spiritual mantras of the Upanishads and the Veda, the mantras given by a Guru to his disciple to help him come consciously into direct contact with a special plane of consciousness, a force or a divine being. In this case, the sound holds in itself the power of experience and realization it is a sound that makes one see.
Similarly, poetry and music, which are but unconscious processes of handling these secret vibrations, can be a powerful means of opening up the consciousness. If we could compose conscious poetry or music through the conscious manipulation of higher vibrations, we would create masterpieces endowed with initiatory powers. Instead of a poetry that is a fantasy of the intellect and a nautch-girl of the mind,202 as Sri Aurobindo put it, we would create a mantric music or poetry to bring the gods into our life. 203 For true poetry is action; it opens little inlets in the consciousness we are so walled in, so barricaded! through which the Real can enter. It is a mantra of the Real,204 an initiation. This is what the Vedic rishis and the seers of the Upanishads did with their mantras, which have the power of communicating illumination to one who is ready. 205 This is what Sri Aurobindo has explained in his Future Poetry and what he has accomplished himself in Savitri.
1.15 - Sex Morality, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
But there is another point at issue. This incidentally, is where the "automatic safeguards" come in. "...thou hast no right but to do thy will." (AL I, 42) means that to "go anwhoring after strange" purposes can only be disastrous. It is possible, in Chemistry, to provoke an endothermic reaction; but that is only asking for trouble. The product bears within its own heart the seed of dissolution. Accordingly, the most important preliminary to any Magical operation is to make sure that its object is not only harmonious with, but necessary to, your Great Work.
Note also that the use of this supreme method involves the manipulation of energies ineffably secret and most delicately sensitive; it compares with the operations of ordinary Magick as the last word in artillery does with the blunderbuss!
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Everything is colossally stupid. This supramental "authority" is not some kind of supermagic, far from it; it is an extremely precise process, as precise and exact as a Chemistry experiment, except that instead of dealing with external objects, the supramental being acts upon the true vibration in the core of each thing and combines it with other vibrations in order to achieve a particular result, like a painter mixing colors for a picture or a poet combining sounds for a poem. He is truly a poet, for he creates what he names. The true name of an object is the vibration constituting it; to name an object is to have the power to evoke it or to destroy it.
The spontaneous and natural quality of supramental life for ultimately only Truth is natural will be expressed also in a supramental art, which will be a direct and exact representation of our particular spiritual tonality; an art in which cheating will have become impossible because only our inner light will be able to touch and play upon the same lights involved in Matter and mold from it the corresponding forms. If our vibration is gray, our creation will be similarly gray, and everything we touch will be gray. Our physical,
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Again, this is nothing new. When I was with Sir C. V. Raman he told me that the theory of smell could be explained from his theory of light. Smell need no longer be explained in terms of Chemistry. Now, there is something new; it is progress. That is what I mean, when I say that there is nothing new in all the statements I hear now.
M.: I is never new. It is eternally the same.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Again, this is nothing new. When I was with Sir C. V. Raman he told me that the theory of smell could be explained from his theory of light. Smell need no longer be explained in terms of Chemistry. Now, there is something new; it is progress. That is what I mean, when I say that there is nothing new in all the statements I hear now.
M.: 'I' is never new. It is eternally the same.
1953-11-18, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Those who studied Chemistry and alighted upon explosives.
If they didnt know what it was, yes. For instance, you take some potassium chlorate, quite harmless, white, pretty, crystallised, charming. But then you take a hammer and start hitting it with all your might, and suddenly it explodes. Yes, it is like that.
1954-02-10 - Study a variety of subjects - Memory -Memory of past lives - Getting rid of unpleasant thoughts, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, yes! I have heard that, especially from your teachers. I dont agree. And I know it very well, this is being continuously repeated to me: if anything is to be done properly, one must specialize. It is the same thing for sports also. It is the same for every thing in life. It is said and repeated, and there are people who will prove it: to do something well one must specialize. One must do that and concentrate. If one wants to become a good philosopher, one must learn only philosophy, if one wants to be a good chemist, one must learn Chemistry only. And if one wants to become a good tennis-player, one must play only tennis. Thats not what I think, that is all I can say. My experience is different. I believe there are general faculties and that it is much more important to acquire these than to specialiseunless, naturally, it be like M. and Mme. Curie who wanted to develop a certain science, find something new, then of course they were compelled to concentrate on that science. But still that was only till they had discovered it; once they had found it, nothing stopped them from widening their mind.
This is something I have heard from my very childhood, and I believe our great grandparents heard the same thing, and from all time it has been preached that if you want to succeed in something you must do only that. And as for me, I was scolded all the time because I did many different things! And I was always told I would never be good at anything. I studied, I did painting, I did music, and besides was busy with other things still. And I was told my music wouldnt be up to much, my painting wouldnt be worthwhile, and my studies would be quite incomplete. Probably it is quite true, but still I have found that this had its advantagesthose very advantages I am speaking about, of widening, making supple ones mind and understanding. It is true that if I had wanted to be a first-class player and to play in concerts, it would have been necessary to do what they said. And as for painting, if I had wanted to be among the great artists of the period, it would have been necessary to do that. Thats quite understandable. But still, that is just one point of view. I dont see any necessity of being the greatest artist, the greatest musician. That has always seemed to me a vanity. And besides, it is a question of opinion.
1954-03-03 - Occultism - A French scientists experiment, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No. When a formation of this kind acts, it goes with a definite purpose. It has been made with a definite purpose. It acts and once its action is over, it disappears, it has no longer any raison dtre. It was a formation for a particular action. When the action is accomplished, the formation dissolves. There are many other kinds of formations with more or less durable lives. I tell you it is a scienceyou cannot learn Chemistry in an hour! But still, in a case like that, when the formation returns and strikes the one who has made it, it is finished. Its action is accomplished and comes to an end.
Everybody doesnt know the story of the stones. You narrated it only to the little children, Sweet Mother.
1954-06-30 - Occultism - Religion and vital beings - Mothers knowledge of what happens in the Ashram - Asking questions to Mother - Drawing on Mother, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Occultism is exactly what he has said: it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with Chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as the knowledge of Chemistry for material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces, their different vibrations, their interrelations, the combinations which can be made by bringing them together and the power one can exercise over them. It is absolutely scientific; and it ought to be learnt like a science; that is, one cannot practise occultism as something emotional or something vague and imprecise. You must work at it as you would do at Chemistry, and learn all the rules or find them if there is nobody to teach you. But it is at some risk to yourself that you can find them. There are combinations here as explosive as certain chemical combinations.
Is occultism necessary in this life?
1955-08-03 - Nothing is impossible in principle - Psychic contact and psychic influence - Occult powers, adverse influences; magic - Magic, occultism and Yogic powers -Hypnotism and its effects, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Magic: these are different kinds of processes which were fixed probably by people who had a certain knowledge, and still more a certain power of vital formation. These things can be learnt without having any special capacity, that is, someone who has no inner power can learn this as he learns Chemistry, for example, or mathematics. It is one of the things which are learnt like that, it is not a thing one acquires. So it doesnt itself carry any special virtues except the same kind of qualities as those one learns through chemical manipulations. You may reproduce these manipulations, but if you are an intelligent and capable being, you can by the help of these manipulations obtain an interesting and useful result, and in any case, be sheltered from all danger; whereas if you are an idiot, misfortunes may come to you. It is something similar.
With the help of magical formulas one may produce a certain result, but this result is necessarily limited and has no particular interest for those who, through their inner development, spontaneously receive powers of which they have a higher knowledge, not a mechanical one. It is not for someone who is truly a yogi; it has no interest except that of curiosity. It is interesting only for people who are precisely not yogis and who want to have certain powers which, in fact, they have in a very limited wayit is always limited.
1956-04-11 - Self-creator - Manifestation of Time and Space - Brahman-Maya and Ishwara-Shakti - Personal and Impersonal, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is not altogether correct, it is an analogy: the air, wind, water, do have a personality, but this is only to make you understand. To the air you cannot give a precise and definite form, it is everywhere: in your body, outside your body, here, there; but it has no precise form. It has an exact, precise position, but of course we are not talking about Chemistry, we are speaking only of the appearance. You dont get the feeling of a person when you think of the air.
I wouldnt say as much of water, because water has very specific characteristics. The water of one river is not the same as that of another; and this is perceptible, so it also has something of a personal character.
1957-09-11 - Vital chemistry, attraction and repulsion, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1957-09-11 - Vital Chemistry, attraction and repulsion
class:chapter
--
Usually this is based on vital affinities, nothing else. There are vital vibrations which harmonise and vital vibrations which dont. It is usually this, nothing else. It is vital Chemistry.
One would have to be in a much deeper and more clear-sighted consciousness for it to be otherwise. There is an inner perception based on a psychic consciousness, which makes you feel which people have the same aspiration, the same aim, and can be your companions on the way; and this perception also makes you clear-sighted about those who follow a very different way or carry in them forces which are hostile to you and may harm you in your development. But to attain such a perception one must oneself be exclusively occupied with ones own spiritual progress and integral realisation. Now, that is not often the case. And usually too, when one has attained this inner clear-sightedness, it is not expressed by attraction and repulsion, but by a very objective knowledge, it might be said, and a kind of inner certainty which makes you act calmly and reasonably, and without attractions and repulsions.
Therefore, it may be said in a general and almost absolute way that those who have very definite and impulsive likes and dislikes live in a vital consciousness. Mixed with this, there may be mental affinities; that is, some minds like to have relationships in common activities, but here too, these are people on a much higher level intellectually, and this is also expressed even more by a comparative ease in relationships and by something much more calm and detached. One takes pleasure in speaking with certain people, for others there is no attraction, one gains nothing from it. It is a little more distant and quiet; it belongs more to the field of reason. But likes and dislikes clearly belong to the vital world. Well, there is a vital Chemistry just as there is physical Chemistry: there are bodies which repel each other and others which attract; there are substances which combine and others which explode, and it is like that. There are some vital vibrations which harmonise, and harmonise to such an extent that ninety-nine times out of a hundred these sympathies are taken for what men call love, and suddenly people feel, Oh! He is the one I was waiting for, Oh! She is the one I was seeking! (laughing), and they rush towards each other, till they find out that it was something very superficial and that these things cant last. There. So the first advice given to those who want to do yoga: Rise above likes and dislikes. This is something without any deeper reality and it can at the very least lead you into difficulties which are at times quite hard to overcome. You can ruin your life with these things. And the best thing is not to take any notice of themto draw back a little into yourself and ask yourself whyits nothing very mysteriousyou like to meet this person, dont like to meet that one.
But, as I say, there comes a moment when one is exclusively occupied with ones sadhana, when one can feel but both more subtly and much more quietly that a particular contact is favourable to sadhana and another harmful. But that always takes a much more detached form, so to say, and often it even contradicts the so-called attractions and repulsions of the vital; very often it has nothing to do with them.
1958-09-10 - Magic, occultism, physical science, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you use chemical formulas in an ignorant way, you can cause an explosion (laughter), and that is very dangerous! Well, if you use occult formulas ignorantlyor egoistically, which is even worse than ignorantlyyou can also have harmful results. But that doesnt mean that occultism is bad or hypnotism is bad or Chemistry is bad. You are not going to ban Chemistry because there are people who cause explosions! (Laughter)
To learn occultism one must have special qualities, whereas for learning science
1f.lovecraft - Ashes, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Professor of Chemistry at the College so he could have more time for
his experiments. Why, I even helped him choose the plans for that
--
to dabble quite a bit in Chemistry?
I nodded, and Bruce continued:
--
Chemistry to warrant a trial.
He had a young lady doing his secretarial worka Miss Marjorie Purdy.
--
seem to stump her. That girl took to Chemistry as a duck takes to
water!
1f.lovecraft - Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
universe through physics, Chemistry, and biology, the logical mind will
classify it as a singular product of dementiaa dementia communicated
1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry
or alchemy would appear to have played a great part, for he took from
--
branch of organic Chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from
the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting
1f.lovecraft - The Disinterment, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
had spent much time in Chemistry and in the search for new drugs which
might be used as aids in surgery. Looking back at those studies now, I
1f.lovecraft - The Dreams in the Witch House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
of high atomic weight which Chemistry was absolutely powerless to
classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element,
1f.lovecraft - The Man of Stone, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Chemistry than on the Outer Powers. If I can get hold of the right
stuff I can brew a drink thatll pass for home-made wine, and one swig
1f.lovecraft - The Shunned House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
or material Chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which
loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube
1.pbs - Letter To Maria Gisborne, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
And some odd volumes of old Chemistry.
Near those a most inexplicable thing,
1.rb - An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Kar, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
sublimate: in old-fashioned Chemistry, the name for compounds
made by heating bodies to a vapour and then allowing this to condense.
1.rwe - Blight, #Emerson - Poems, #Ralph Waldo Emerson, #Philosophy
Their fragrance, and their Chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
--
And an omnipotence in Chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
1.whitman - Ashes Of Soldiers, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
O love! O chant! solve all, fructify all with the last Chemistry.
Give me exhaustlessmake me a fountain,
1.whitman - Eidolons, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Chemistry,
The entities of entities, Eidlons.
1.whitman - Song Of The Redwood-Tree, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Chemistry;
The slow and steady ages ploddingthe unoccupied surface ripening
1.whitman - The Sleepers, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
They pass the invigoration of the night, and the Chemistry of the
night, and awake.
1.whitman - This Compost, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
What Chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
First the complexity. Chemistry teaches us that the cellular
edifice is based on albuminoids, nitrogenous organic substances
2.02 - THE EXPANSION OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
cause Chemistry is still floundering over the formation of granites,
should we dispute the fact that the continents become more
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
of the Vedic analysis of existence that the elements of the Upanishad are not the elementary substances of modern Chemistry but
five general states of matter to which all its actual or substantial
2.07 - The Cup, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
62:On the exoteric side if necessary the mind should be trained by the study of any well-developed science, such as Chemistry, or mathematics.
63:The idea of organization is the first step, that of interpretation the second. The Master of the Temple, whose grade corresponds to Binah, is sworn to "interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul."
2.15 - On the Gods and Asuras, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: That may be possible in Life manifested in Matter, but in the pure Matter, in the domain of Chemistry and physics?
Sri Aurobindo: Why not ? We are speaking of the material part of the human consciousness. What is a law? It means a certain balance among universal forces under certain conditions. If you change the conditions you get a different result. It is not by a miracle that you change what you call a law.
2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
their instrument of expression or manifestation; they are [its] instrument made of its substance, dependent on [its] substance, inexistent without it. Mind is an action of Matter, not a separate power or force; there is nothing in it superior to the physicality of the body; it exists by the body and as a part of its activity, lasts along with it, dies with it. Mind is a product of gases, some operation of Nature's Chemistry, glandular influences, nervous stimuluses; it is matter and records the operations of Matter.
But why then this appearance of mentality, of consciousness, of a conscious being? That too is only a trick of Matter. They are reflexes and reactions to the contacts of things outside, to other material objects, bodies, movements, forces. Sense and sensation are the reply of the nerves to stimulus of external and material things or to internal stimuli that are still material. To the experience of the body the result of these, recoils, reflexes, reactions, may seem mental, but that cannot alter the fact that they are material products of the workings of Matter.
2.2.03 - The Science of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is true also that modern inquiry probing into psychological (as opposed to physiological) phenomena has discovered certain truths that are equally discovered by Yogic process, the role of the subconscient, the subliminal, double or multiple personality; but its observations in these fields are of an extremely groping and initial character and one does not see easily how it can arrive at the same largeness of results here as in physiology, physics, Chemistry or other departments of physical Science.
It is only by Yoga process that one can arrive at an instrumentation which will drive large wide roads into the psychological Unknown and not only obscure and narrow tunnels. The field of psychology needs a direct inner psychological instrumentation by which we can arrive at sure data and sure results in ourselves verified [by] equally sure data [and] results in our observation of others and of the hidden psychological world and its play of unseen forces. The physical is the outwardly seen and sensed and needs physical instruments for its exploration; the psychological is the physically unseen and unsensed, to be discovered only by an organisation of the inward senses and other now undeveloped and occult means. It is through consciousness, by an instrumentation of consciousness only that the nature and laws and movements of consciousness can be discovered - and this is the method of Yoga.
2.24 - The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Occultism is in its essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical limits of being, an attempt in particular to possess and organise the mysterious, occult, outwardly still undeveloped direct power of Mind upon Life and of both Mind and Life over Matter. There is at the same time an endeavour to establish communication with worlds and entities belonging to the supraphysical heights, depths and intermediate levels of cosmic Being and to utilise this communion for the mastery of a higher Truth and for a help to man in his will to make himself sovereign over Nature's powers and forces. This human aspiration takes its stand on the belief, intuition or intimation that we are not mere creatures of the mud, but souls, minds, wills that can know all the mysteries of this and every world and become not only Nature's pupils but her adepts and masters. The occultist sought to know the secret of physical things also and in this effort he furthered astronomy, created Chemistry, gave an impulse to other sciences, for he utilised geometry also and the science of numbers; but still more he sought to know the secrets of supernature. In this sense occultism might be described as the science of the supernatural; but it is in fact only the discovery of the supraphysical, the surpassing of the material limit, - the heart of occultism is not the impossible chimera which hopes to go beyond or outside all force of Nature and make pure phantasy and arbitrary miracle omnipotently effective. What seems to us supernatural is in fact either a spontaneous irruption of the phenomena of other-Nature into physical Nature or, in the work of the occultist, a possession of the knowledge and power of the higher orders or grades of cosmic Being and Energy and the direction of their forces and processes towards the production of effects in the physical world by seizing on possibilities of interconnection and means for a material effectuality. There are powers of the mind and the life-force which have not been included in Nature's present systematisation of mind and life in matter, but are potential and can be brought to bear upon material things and happenings or even brought in and added to the present systematisation so as to enlarge the control of mind over our own life and body or to act on the minds, lives, bodies of others or on the movements of cosmic Forces. The modern admission of hypnotism is an example of such a discovery and systematised application, - though still narrow and limited, limited by its method and formula, - of occult powers which otherwise touch us only by a casual or a hidden action whose process is unknown to us or imperfectly caught by a few; for we are all the time undergoing a battery of suggestions, thought suggestions, impulse suggestions, will suggestions, emotional and sensational suggestions, thought waves, life waves that come on us or into us from others or from the universal Energy, but act and produce their effects without our knowledge. A systematised endeavour to know these movements and their law and possibilities, to master and use the power or Nature-force behind them or to protect ourselves from them would fall within one province of occultism: but it would only be a small part even of that province; for wide and multiple are the possible fields, uses, processes of this vast range of little explored Knowledge.
In modern times, as physical Science enlarged its discoveries and released the secret material forces of Nature into an action governed by human knowledge for human use, occultism receded and was finally set aside on the ground that the physical alone is real and mind and life are only departmental activities of Matter. On this basis, believing material Energy to be the key of all things, Science has attempted to move towards a control of mind and life processes by a knowledge of the material instrumentation and process of our normal and abnormal mind and life functionings and activities; the spiritual is ignored as only one form of mentality. It may be observed in passing that if this endeavour succeeded, it might not be without danger for the existence of the human race, even as now are certain other scientific discoveries misused or clumsily used by a humanity mentally and morally unready for the handling of powers so great and perilous; for it would be an artificial control applied without any knowledge of the secret forces which underlie and sustain our existence. Occultism in the West could be thus easily pushed aside because it never reached its majority, never acquired ripeness and a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged too freely in the romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of concentrating its major effort on the discovery of formulas and effective modes for using supernormal powers. It deviated into magic white and black or into a romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. These tendencies and this insecurity of mental foundation made it difficult to defend and easy to discredit, a target facile and vulnerable. In Egypt and the East this line of knowledge arrived at a greater and more comprehensive endeavour: this ampler maturity can be seen still intact in the remarkable system of the Tantras; it was not only a many-sided science of the supernormal but supplied the basis of all the occult elements of religion and even developed a great and powerful system of spiritual discipline and self-realisation. For the highest occultism is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities of mind and life and spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being.
2.25 - AFTER THE PASSING AWAY, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
NARENDRA: "Haven't you studied Chemistry? Who combines the different elements? It is a human hand that combines hydrogen, oxygen, and electricity to prepare water. Everybody admits the existence of an Intelligent Force — a Force that is the essence of Knowledge and that guides all these phenomena."
PRASANNA: "How are we to know that God is kind?"
3.00.2 - Introduction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
away from the problem of Chemistry and back to the ancient myth of the
royal or divine marriage; but in Kekuls vision it reached its chemical
--
advances in synthetic Chemistry. Looking back, we can say that the
alchemists had keen noses when they made this arcanum arcanorum, this
--
We find, however, that alchemy did not merely change into Chemistry
by gradually discovering how to break away from its mythological
3.00 - The Magical Theory of the Universe, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Modern conceptions of Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics are sheer paradox to
the plain man who thinks of Matter as something that one can knock up against.
--
case of the Periodic Law in Chemistry, which enables Science to
prophesy, and so in the end to discover, the existence of certain
3.03 - SULPHUR, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[147] As investigators of nature the alchemists showed their Christian attitude by their pistis in the object of their science, and it was not their fault if in many cases the psyche proved stronger than the chemical substance and its well-guarded secrets by distorting the results. It was only the acuter powers of observation in modern man which showed that weighing and measuring provided the key to the locked doors of chemical combination, after the intuition of the alchemists had stressed for centuries the importance of measure, number, and weight.165 The prime and most immediate experience of matter was that it is animated, which for medieval man was self-evident; indeed every Mass, every rite of the Church, and the miraculous effect of relics all demonstrated for him this natural and obvious fact. The French Enlightenment and the shattering of the metaphysical view of the world were needed before a scientist like Lavoisier had the courage finally to reach out for the scales. To begin with, however, the alchemists were fascinated by the soul of matter, which, unknown to them, it had received from the human psyche by way of projection. For all their intensive preoccupation with matter as a concrete fact they followed this psychic trail, which was to lead them into a region that, to our way of thinking, had not the remotest connection with Chemistry. Their mental labours consisted in a predominantly intuitive apprehension of psychic facts, the intellect playing only the modest role of a famulus. The results of this curious method of research proved, however, to be beyond the grasp of any psychology for several centuries. If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. The misfortune of the alchemists was that they themselves did not know what they were talking about. Nevertheless, we possess witnesses enough to the high esteem in which they held their science and to the wonderment which the mystery of matter instilled into them. For they discoveredto keep to sulphur as our examplein this substance, which was one of the customary attri butes of hell and the devil, as well as in the poisonous, crafty, and treacherous Mercurius, an analogy with the most sacrosanct figure of their religion. They therefore imbued this arcanum with symbols intended to characterize its malicious, dangerous, and uncanny nature, choosing precisely those which in the positive sense were used for Christ in the patristic literature. These were the snake, the lion, the eagle, fire, cloud, shadow, fish, stone, the unicorn and the rhinoceros, the dragon, the night-raven, the man encompassed by a woman, the hen, water, and many others. This strange usage is explained by the fact that the majority of the patristic allegories have in addition to their positive meaning a negative one. Thus in St. Eucherius166 the rapacious wolf in its good part signifies the apostle Paul, but in its bad part the devil.
[148] From this we would have to conclude that the alchemists had discovered the psychological existence of a shadow which opposes and compensates the conscious, positive figure. For them the shadow was in no sense a privatio lucis; it was so real that they even thought they could discern its material density, and this concretism led them to attri bute to it the dignity of being the matrix of an incorruptible and eternal substance. In the religious sphere this psychological discovery is reflected in the historical fact that only with the rise of Christianity did the devil, the eternal counterpart of Christ, assume his true form, and that the figure of Antichrist appears on the scene already in the New Testament. It would have been natural for the alchemists to suppose that they had lured the devil out of the darkness of matter. There were indeed indications of this, as we have seen, but they are exceptions. Far more prevalent and truly characteristic of alchemy was the optimistic notion that this creature of darkness was destined to be the medicina, as is proved by the use of the term medicina et medicus for the untrustworthy sulphur. The very same appellation appears as an allegory of Christ in St. Ambrose.167 The Greek word
3.03 - THE MODERN EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
conquered the surrounding territory Chemistry, physics, socio-
logy and even mathematics and the history of religions. One
3.03 - The Naked Truth, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
and practice of modern Chemistry; it is a moral as well as a psychological
undertaking. The texts are full of such admonitions, and they indicate the
3.05 - The Formula of I.A.O., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
back into copper and sulphur. Crowley read Chemistry at Trinity (he had
previously had a summer job as a lab assistant), and while not graduating nevertheless made much use of analogies drawn from his studies in later writings.]
3.0 - THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
hydrogen in Chemistry)??? Is this rule simply a protracted kind of mood?
If the universe had been able to become an organism it would have
3.1.24 - In the Moonlight, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Through Chemistry she seeks the source of life,
Nor knows the mighty laws that she has found,
3.12 - Of the Bloody Sacrifice, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
and Chemistry of the brief moment of death, we could get hold of the force in some
way, supply the missing element, reverse the electrical conditions, or what not.
3.20 - Of the Eucharist, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
theory, that our apparently immutable elements should be modifications of a single one.1 Organic Chemistry, with its metatheses and
syntheses dependent on the conceptions of molecules as geometrical
--
been referring not to Chemistry, but to some spiritual operations
whose sanctity demanded some such symbolic veil as the cryptographic use of the language of the laboratory.
--
vindicate Alchemy, while extending Chemistry to cover all classes of
Change.
33.02 - Subhash, Oaten: atlas, Russell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The life-story of this Ullaskar is a real drama, although its last stage is rather tragic. Soon after this incident he joined the Manicktolla Gardens with Barin Ghose and gave all his thought and energy to the making of a bomb. He did not know even the ABC's of bombs. He read up by himself books on Chemistry, pieced out information from all kinds of books and finally mastered all alone the principles of explosives - nobody ever taught him. His father, Dwijadas Datta, was a professor at the Sibpur Engineering College. He had something like a small iaboratory at his residence. It was here that Ullaskar took his training in secret. To what extent he had finally succeeded in his efforts was proved one day when to the first of his bombs one of our own men had to fall a martyr - Prafulla Chakravarti.
I too had been an associate of his in this enterprise.
33.03 - Muraripukur - I, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It was about this time that I hovered around the newly founded National College in Calcutta for a short while. My aims were a little "dubious". At the Gardens, there used to be discussions about the bomb, so an idea came to my head: could not the National College offer an opportunity to study the subject? I thought of reading Chemistry and by joining the Chemistry practicals learn the principles of explosives. At that time the Superintendent (or perhaps Principal) was Satish Chandra Mukherji, Founder-President of the Dawn Society. I had met him several years ago in the premises of the Society.
Let me then narrate this earlier story in the present connection. I had just come to Calcutta and joined the First Year. Atul Gupta took me to a meeting of the Dawn Society. Benoy Sarkar was there, Radha Kumud Mukherji too was there, I think - not his younger brother Radha Kamal who became one of my class-fellows in the Third Year after he had passed the F .A. examination from Berhampore. Here is a sketch of one of the Society's meetings. Satish Mukherji took the chair. We were about twenty or thirty young men in all. He read out a verse from the Gita: 'yad yad vibhutimat sattvam, srimad-urjitam-eva va' and gave a short explanation in a few words. Then we formed ourselves into small groups of four or five. We were to discuss what is meant by "sriman" and "vibhutiman", where is the difference between the two, what do we understand by "urjita"? Each group was to discuss separately, each member was to say what he had to say, and finally all of us were to write out in the form of an essay our respective viewpoints. The essays would then be submitted to the chairman for his consideration and judgment. I sat absolutely dumb in that first session, an ignoramus among the learned, like a goose in the midst of swans. (I must have been about fourteen at that time). But I did not feel quite at ease in that atmosphere, I had an impression it was all fine talk and dry debate, purely academic, one would say. Satish Chandra had no doubt wanted to use this as a means of forming the character and not merely as an intellectual training, a way of moulding the life, something that had been missing in our college education. I do not know to what extent he succeeded in actual fact.
This was about the middle of 1904. It was three years later, about the middle of 1907, that I met Satish Chandra again. He could not have remembered about me, nor did I remind him. He asked me, "You are a student of literature and philosophy. Why do you want to read Science?" - "I have read physics and Chemistry for my F.A. (that is, Intermediate). I have a special attraction for those subjects, that is why." However, the matter did not proceed very far, for I was getting more and more engrossed in the life at the Gardens.
Almost about the same period, I had thought of another childish plan, again in connection with the making of a bomb: the thing had so much got into my head. I was a student of the Calcutta Presidency College where the great Jagadish Chandra was professor at the time. Here was the idea and it was approved by my leaders - could I not join his laboratory, as some kind of an assistant? Then one could carry on research and experiments on bombs. But how to get hold of him? I thought of Sister Nivedita. She was a great friend of Jagadish Bose and it was easy to approach Nivedita, for she was one among our circle of acquaintances. But the occasion did not arise for this line of advance, for things had been moving fast at the Gardens.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Several of the teachers are applying the basic ideas of the seminar in their own teaching and are reporting quite significant results in terms of student motivation and technical performance. The flexibility of the approach is suggested by the fact that teachers in many different fields and grade levels are using some adaptation of it. For instance, William Eblen and his associates in Wilton, Connecticut, use their own variation of this approach in their high school and college ecology project, Total Education for a Total Environment (TETE). Professor Rossalie Pinkham, Director of Laboratory Schools, Southern Connecticut State College, and Chairman, Consortium on Systems Education, New Haven, uses it as a springboard into, and as a frame of reference for, linguistic and social science subject areas. Chemistry teachers in high school use the periodic table as a springboard into interdisciplinary units. Biology teachers can use the general model as a functional framework for integrating the study of evolution in all the traditional sub-fields of biology and for relating evolution theory to psycho-social studies. Historians and anthropologists use it as a functional basis for explaining the process of change.
Being an economist who had already developed a broad economizing model for interpreting the universe of organized energy before meeting Mr. Haskell two years ago, I have blended his model into the economizing framework. A brief sketch of that master model will set the stage for describing the nature and importance of the task of developing a meta-language of the sciences, and for describing the particular approach we are developing at the SCSC Center for I-D Creativity.
--
Into this leadership vacuum rush the ideologists--people such as the totalitarian democrats and various fascistic racists, whose worldviews were prematurely unified in the nineteenth century; unified before the rise of modern physics, Chemistry, biology, genetics, or any other modern science; and by non-scientists at that. Their misinterpretations of history, genetics, psychology, and so forth are, however, systematic and mutually reinforcing. This gives them the confidence which our traditional leaders lack, and therewith the power to mislead the Majority disastrously.44
How have we found out that they are misleading our education and our culture a In the same way that physical and biological scientists find out when they are misled: by making theoretical models and subjecting them to experimental verification. "The verification of a model such as occurred with Rutherford's nuclear atom can greatly extend the range and scope of the physicist's understanding," say physicists Kendall and Panofsky. "It is through the interplay of observation, prediction, and comparison that the laws of nature are slowly clarified."45
--
Partial syntheses--syntheses of groups of sciences such as physics, Chemistry and biology, or psychology and sociology--do not resolve the ontological problem. Quine implies this as follows:
"All that is required toward a function is an open sentence with two free variables, provided that it is fulfilled by exactly one value of the first variable for each object of the old universe [one discipline] as value of the second variable [another discipline] ." Such a function is implicit throughout the System-hierarchy. It is implied, for instance, in Figure II-1. "But the point is that it is only in the background theory, with its inclusive universe, that we can hope to write such a sentence and have the right values at our disposal for its variables." p. 58.46 That is the theory of Unified Science.
--
It was Mendeleev's completion of the Periodic Law a century ago in Chemistry (and only Mendeleev intuited its cosmic or philosophical implications) which prematurely organized the physical sciences. And it will be the extension of this organization to the social and biological sciences which will complete this basically moral orientation, transmuting Koestler's "moral dwarfs" into (computer-assisted) moral giants, and giving our society's controller moral direction, and thus balance and stabilitv.
Today, in the Seventies, hindsight reveals these things. But back in the Forties, only a few colleagues and a handful of students had the faintest notion of what had to be done. I therefore instinctively organized the first Invisible College for our time: the Council for Unified Research and Education, Inc. was founded during the Centenary celebration of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And what was its objective, from its beginning in 1948? We announced it visibly enough in Science: "An OSRD-like organization which may hope to succeed in advancing social (and biological) science through the stages of natural classification (J. S. Mill) and evolution theory (von Bertallanffy and Norbert Wiener), into that achieved by the physical sciences, where scientific fields are connected, and science is closely linked to philosophy and technology. The possibility of such coordination emerged with the independent discoveries of parts of the same conceptual scheme by students of plant, animal, and human coactions (as Leibniz had predicted) . . . Should this scheme prove to be a natural classification (J. S. Mill), it would create conditions for rapid coordination and advance of social science, as the Periodic Table did in Chemistry."39,40
The announcement ended with a prediction that only a few Brooklyn College students could at that time begin to understand: "It is anticipated that the philosophical, scientific, and technological structures of Western and Eastern ideologies about conflict and cooperation will have been sufficiently clarified by then to make possible their gradual displacement by an advanced social science which is systematic, useful, and universally accepted, as physical science already is today."40
--
What we have done for science as a whole is at best only the sort of thing that Mendeleev did for Chemistry. We have designed a model and some parts of a machine-tool for this model's manufacture. But fortunately we have done this much in time: In 1970, in his article on "The Club of Rome and the Predicament of Mankind," the Club's president, A. Peccei, published a call for a systematic viewpoint; a project which it takes decades to execute.
"The Club of Rome," says the Science Policy Bulletin, "comprises some 50 scientists, planners, intellectuals and industrialists from Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and North and Latin America, and is concerned with global problems of the techno-scientific (Lower Industrial) society. The `action oriented' Club of Rome `believes it is still possible . . . to meet this unprecedented tangle of problems beforc it outstrips our capacity for control.' The Club's first objective is `to acquire and spread an in-depth understanding of the present critical state of human affairs and of the narrowing and uncertain perspectives and options which are likely for the future, if present trends are not corrected. The second objective is, then, to recognize and propose new policy guidelines and patterns of action capable of redressing the situation and keeping it under control."42 Then comes the call for the leading link, the strategic factor: Peccei affirms that "the Club feels there is an urgent necessity for a `Copernican change' in attitude, to shift from a fragmented viewpoint to a systematic viewpoint."19
--
CASSIDY, Harold Gomes, born in Havana, Cuba, October 17, 1906; A.B. Oberlin College, 1930, A.M. 1932; Ph.D. ( Chemistry) Yale, 1939. Member of Yale faculty, 1938-72, professor of Chemistry, 1958-72. National Sigma Xi lecturer, 1960, 1965; Ayd lecturer, 1962; Korzybski Memorial lecturer, 1962; national lecturer, Scientific Research Society of America, 1965; senior fellow in science, Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1965-66; Danforth visiting lecturer, Association of American Colleges Arts Program, 1968, 1971 ; Sigma Xi centennial lecturer, Ohio State University, 1970. Recipient of third John Prymak service award, Connecticut Science Teachers Association, 1968; national award for excellence in Chemistry teaching, Manufacturing Chemists Association, 1972. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York Academy of Sciences; secretary, Council for Unified Research and Education; member of New University Council. Author : (with J. English) Principles of Organic Chemistry, 1949; Absorption and Chromatography, 1951; (with J. English) Laboratory Book, 1951; Fundamentals of Chromatography, 1957; The Sciences and the Arts, 1962 ; (with K. A. Kun) Oxidation-Reduction Polymers, 1965; Knowledge, Experience and Action, 1969; Science Restated--Physics and Chemistry for the Non-Scientist, 1970; numerous articles. Associate editor, American Journal of Science, 1948-67. Address : Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana.
CLARK, Jere Walton, born in Rex, Georgia, January 31, 1922; B.B.A. University of Georgia, 1947, M.A. 1949; Du Pont fellow, University of Virginia, 1949-51, Ph.D. (economics) 1953. Assistant professor, West Virginia University, 1952-55; associate professor, University of Chattanooga, 1955-62; professor of economics, Southern Connecticut State College, 1962- , chairman of Department of economics, 1966-70, director of Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity, 1967- . Recipient of award for best college course in economics, Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation, 1963. Chairman, task force on general systems education, Society for General Systems Research; executive director, Consortium on Systems Education, New Haven. Address : Center for Interdisciplinary Creativity, Southern Connecticut State College, New Haven, Connecticut 06515.
--
THE CONCEPT of type specimens or paradigm cases of theoretical constructs is commonplace in traditional astronomy, geology, biology and Chemistry. In Chemistry, pure samples of a chemical element listed in the Periodic Table of chemical elements, samples say of hydrogen or uranium, are type specimens or paradigm cases of the theoretical classes in question. In traditional biology, each species and sub-species of plants or animals listed in the taxonomic classification is keyed to one or more type specimens carefully preserved in cases, bottles, presses, and so forth, in various museums and other institutions. In astrophysics and geology, type specimens (paradigm cases of theoretical classes) are keyed to specific geoid bodies or geophysical entities.
There is, however, a strategic difference between the chemical classification and most others: The chemical classification includes both quantitative and qualitative, both Stratum-Period and Group characteristics, while the traditional biological and geoid classifications omit the latter. This happened because the atomic Groups are classes of coaction potentialities between the atom in question and its chemical habitat (classes of so-called chemical properties), whereas traditional taxonomic classifications are confined to entities and omit their habitats. They stop short of the next necessary step, classifying the coactions between them. Since coactions are traditionally called moral relations, it is their omission that deprives these traditional disciplines of moral force; and, of course, it is their inclusion which confers upon Unified Science and its organised disciplines their moral force (see Glossary). This will become very clear when we discuss human cultures, where moral relations have long been recognised.
--
The second sighting variable, which is analogous to certain defects of the sighting mechanism, is the classifier's own mental-moral organization: his own grasp of the Periodic Law of Human Cultures. (In the history of Chemistry, this mental variable produced the decisive difference between Newland's failure with his Octaves and Mendeleev's success with his Periodic Table, as described by Posin.--A famous example of this variation in anthropology is Ruth Benedict's own change of moral insight from 1934, when she copyrighted Patterns of Culture, to 1941 when she lectured on the same subject at Bryn Mawr College. In 1934 her sighting apparatus was cultural egalitarianism, which she and many others incorrectly labeled cultural relativism. It consists in flat contradiction of the Periodic Law. She stated this unequivocally in Patterns of Culture's concluding sentence, thus: "We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as a new basis for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence" (italics added). This flat denial of the Moral Law spread widely, and has intensified the breakdown symptoms in our culture which Toynbee called promiscuity, truancy, and drift. This is the Existentialists' disastrous way of dealing with the multiplicity of sighting mechanisms which constitutes each individual culture's and sub-culture's compass; namely, the false assertion that they are "equally valid" the abdication of responsibility of judging and assessing them relative to what Heisenberg calls a central order. (This subject is dealt with extensively in Chapter V.)
Frank Goble points out in The Third Force that by 1941, in her Bryn Mawr lectures, "Ruth Benedict was highly dissatisfied with the concept of cultural relativity, which was popular among anthropologists of her day, and with which her name has been closely associated. She struggled to develop a way of comparing various societies as unitary wholes or, in 20th-century terms, as "systems". She tried to correct her sighting error. Unfortunately, Benedict died in 1948. A part of her objective, however, was achieved by Ethel Albert a few years later, as shown above.
36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
Besides, in the current commentaries on the Veda we come across explanations which are at places self-contradictory, inconsistent, lacking in clarity, fanciful and arbitrary. The same word has been used at different places to convey different meanings without any justification, and also at times the commentators have been constrained to keep silent or to confess that they could make neither head nor tail of a passage, a sentence or a word. For instance, the word ghrta (clarified butter) has been explained as jala (water) and the word water has been used for antariksa (ether) and the word vyoman (ether) has been interpreted as prthivi (earth). That is why in the interpretations of Sayana or Ramesh Dutta, in spite of their supplying synonyms of words, a passage taken as a whole appears to be quite odd, confusing and utterly meaningless. One is at a loss to know whether one should indulge in laughter or shed tears over such a performance. It may be argued that the Veda was written in a remote antiquity, hence much of its archaic language is not likely to be understood by men of the present age. It is enough on our part to be able to form a general idea of it. But when one has to resort to a makeshift hocus-pocus even for gathering this general idea, then it becomes quite clear that there must have been some serious blunder somewhere. If it were possible to get the general idea of the Veda quite easily, then all the interpreters would necessarily have pursued it. But unfortunately in the present age we find that besides the sacrificial and naturalistic interpretations there are historical (by Abinash Chandra Das), geographical (by Umesh Chandra Vidyaratna), astronomical (by Tilak), scientific (by Paramasiva Aiyar) and even an interpretation based on Chemistry (by Narayan Gaur) and so on and so forth. Many minds, many ways: nowhere else may this oft-quoted adage be so aptly applied as in the case of the multifarious interpretations of the Veda. A few portions of the Veda that had appealed to an interpreter most in accordance with his own bent of mind gave him the impetus to endeavour to interpret the whole of the Veda in that light. The result has been that the same sloka has been interpreted in ever so many ways. But none of these interpreters has even attempted interpreting the whole or the major portion of the Veda. From this we can dare conclude that the key to the proper interpretation of the Vedic mysteries has not hitherto been found. All are but groping in the dark.
(2)
4.03 - THE ULTIMATE EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
that is to say, without the closed Chemistry of molecules, cells
and phyletic branches, there would never have been either
4.04 - THE REGENERATION OF THE KING, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[415] The whore (meretrix) is a well-known figure in alchemy. She characterizes the arcane substance in its initial, chaotic, maternal state. The Introitus apertus says that the chaos is like a mother of the metals. It is also called our Luna before the royal diadem is extracted from the menstruum of our whore,179 i.e., before the king is reborn from the moon-mother. The Tractatus aureus de lapide says of the arcane substance: That noble whore Venus180 is clothed and enveloped in abounding colour. This colour has a reddish appearance.181 The nobility of this Venus derives from the fact that she is also the queen, the chaste bride of the king.182 In his Practica de lapide Basilius Valentinus says: This tincture is the rose183 of our Masters, of Tyrian hue, called also the red blood of the dragon, described by many, and the purple cloak184 . . . with which the queen is covered.185 A variant says: That precious substance is the Venus of the ancients, the hermaphrodite, who has two sexes.186 Maier writes: In our Chemistry there is Venus and Cupid. For Psyche is the female, Cupid the male, who is held to be the dragon.187 The opus ad rubeum (reddening) takes place in the second house of Venus (Libra).188 Accordingly the Turba remarks that Venus precedes the sun.189 Flamel takes Venus as an important component of the arcane substance; in an apostrophe to the Magnesia he says: Thou bearest within thee the many-formed image of Venus, the cupbearer and fire-spitting servant,190 the latter referring to the sulphurous aspect of Mercurius. Mercurius also plays the role of cup-bearer in the Cantilena. In Flamel the lapis is born of the conjunction of Venus pugnax (fighting Venus)191 and Mercuriusevidently a reference to the quarrelling that precedes their union (cf. the fighting lions). In Valentinuss poem on the prima materia lapidis Venus is identified with the fountain, the mother and bride of the king, in which her fixed father is drowned:
A stone there is, and yet no stone,
--
[446] In order to answer this difficult question one must bear in mind that the alchemists, guided by their keenness for research, were in fact on a hopeful path since the fruit that alchemy bore after centuries of endeavour was Chemistry and its staggering discoveries. The emotional dynamism of alchemy is largely explained by a premonition of these then-unheard-of possibilities. However barren of useful or even enlightening results its labours were, these efforts, notwithstanding their chronic failure, seem to have had a psychic effect of a positive nature, something akin to satisfaction or even a perceptible increase in wisdom. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the alchemists did not turn away in disgust from their almost invariably futile projects. Not that such disillusionments never came to them; indeed the futility of alchemy brought it into increasing disrepute. There remain, nevertheless, a number of witnesses who make it quite clear that their hopeless fumbling, inept as it was from the chemical standpoint, presents a very different appearance when seen from a psychological angle. As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, there occurred during the chemical procedure psychic projections which brought unconscious contents to light, often in the form of vivid visions. The medical psychologist knows today that such projections may be of the greatest therapeutic value. It was not for nothing that the old Masters identified their nigredo with melancholia and extolled the opus as the sovereign remedy for all afflictions of the soul; for they had discovered, as was only to be expected, that though their purses shrank their soul gained in statureprovided of course that they survived certain by no means inconsiderable psychic dangers. The projections of the alchemists were nothing other than unconscious contents appearing in matter, the same contents that modern psycho therapy makes conscious by the method of active imagination before they unconsciously change into projections. Making them conscious and giving form to what is unformed has a specific effect in cases where the conscious attitude offers an overcrowded unconscious no possible means of expressing itself. In these circumstances the unconscious has, as it were, no alternative but to generate projections and neurotic symptoms. The conscious milieu of the Middle Ages provided no adequate outlet for these things. The immense world of natural science lay folded in the bud, as also did that questing religious spirit which we meet in many of the alchemical treatises and which, we may well conjecture, was closely akin to the empiricism of scientific research.
[447] Perhaps the most eloquent witness to this spirit was Meister Eckhart, with his idea of the birth of the son in human individuals and the resultant affiliation of man to God.248 Part of this spirit was realized in Protestantism, another part was intuited by the mystics who succeeded Boehme, in particular by Angelus Silesius, who quite literally perished in the work. He advanced even beyond Protestantism to an attitude of mind that would have needed the support of Indian or Chinese philosophy and would therefore not have been possible until the end of the nineteenth century at the earliest. In his own age Angelus could only wither away unrecognized, and this was the tragedy that befell him. A third part took shape in the empirical sciences that developed independently of all authority, and a fourth appropriated to itself the religious philosophies of the East and transplanted them with varying degrees of skill and taste in the West.
--
[457] I lay particular stress on the phenomena of assimilation in alchemy because they are, in a sense, a prelude to the modern approximation between empirical psychology and Christian dogmaan approximation which Nietzsche clearly foresaw. Psychology, as a science, observes religious ideas from the standpoint of their psychic phenomenology without intruding on their theological content. It puts the dogmatic images into the category of psychic contents, because this constitutes its field of research. It is compelled to do so by the nature of the psyche itself; it does not, like alchemy, try to explain psychic processes in theological terms, but rather to illuminate the darkness of religious images by relating them to similar images in the psyche. The result is a kind of amalgamation of ideas ofso it would seem the most varied provenience, and this sometimes leads to parallels and comparisons which to an uncritical mind unacquainted with the epistemological method may seem like a devaluation or a false interpretation. If this were to be construed as an objection to psychology one could easily say the same thing about the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers, which are often very risky indeed, or about the dubious nature of textual criticism. The psychologist has to investigate religious symbols because his empirical material, of which the theologian usually knows nothing, compels him to do so. Presumably no one would wish to hand over the Chemistry of albuminous bodies to some other department of science on the ground that they are organic and that the investigation of life is a matter for the biologist. A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity. Alchemy, certainly, cannot be defended against the charge of unconsciousness. It is and remains a puzzle whether Ripley ever reflected on his theological enormities and what he thought about them. From a scientific point of view, his mentality resembles that of a dream-state.
[458] The coronation of the Virgin and the heavenly marriage bring us to the final strophes of the Cantilena.
5.1.02 - Ahana, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Are but a singular fireworks, Chemistry lacking the chemist,
Matter's nervous display; the heart's passion, the sorrow and burning
6.01 - THE ALCHEMICAL VIEW OF THE UNION OF OPPOSITES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[665] The adepts strove to realize their speculative ideas in the form of a chemical substance which they thought was endowed with all kinds of magical powers. This is the literal meaning of their uniting the unio mentalis with the body. For us it is certainly not easy to include moral and philosophical reflections in this amalgamation, as the alchemists obviously did. For one thing we know too much about the real nature of chemical combination, and for another we have a much too abstract conception of the mind to be able to understand how a truth can be hidden in matter or what an effective balsam must be like. Owing to medieval ignorance both of Chemistry and of psychology, and the lack of any epistemological criticism, the two concepts could easily mix, so that things that for us have no recognizable connection with one another could enter into mutual relationship.
[666] The dogma of the Assumption and the alchemical mysterium coniunctionis express the same fundamental thought even though in very different symbolism. Just as the Church insists on the literal taking up of the physical body into heaven, so the alchemists believed in the possibility, or even in the actual existence, of their stone or of the philosophical gold. In both cases belief was a substitute for the missing empirical reality. Even though alchemy was essentially more materialistic in its procedures than the dogma, both of them remain at the second, anticipatory stage of the coniunctio, the union of the unio mentalis with the body. Even Dorn did not venture to assert that he or any other adept had perfected the third stage in his lifetime. Naturally there were as many swindlers and dupes as ever who claimed to possess the lapis or golden tincture, or to be able to make it. But the more honest alchemists readily admitted that they had not yet plumbed the final secret.
6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[775] This solution was a compromise to the disadvantage of physis, but it was nevertheless a noteworthy attempt to bridge the dissociation between spirit and matter. It was not a solution of principle, for the very reason that the procedure did not take place in the real object at all but was a fruitless projection, since the caelum could never be fabricated in reality. It was a hope that was extinguished with alchemy and then, it seems, was struck off the agenda for ever. But the dissociation remained, and, in quite the contrary sense, brought about a far better knowledge of nature and a sounder medicine, while on the other hand it deposed the spirit in a manner that would paralyse Dorn with horror could he see it today. The elixir vitae of modern science has already increased the expectation of life very considerably and hopes for still better results in the future. The unio mentalis, on the other hand, has become a pale phantom, and the veritas Christiana feels itself on the defensive. As for a truth that is hidden in the human body, there is no longer any talk of that. History has remorselessly made good what the alchemical compromise left unfinished: the physical man has been unexpectedly thrust into the foreground and has conquered nature in an undreamt-of way. At the same time he has become conscious of his empirical psyche, which has loosened itself from the embrace of the spirit and begun to take on so concrete a form that its individual features are now the object of clinical observation. It has long ceased to be a life-principle or some kind of philosophical abstraction; on the contrary, it is suspected of being a mere epiphenomenon of the Chemistry of the brain. Nor does the spirit any longer give it life; rather is it conjectured that the spirit owes its existence to psychic activity. Today psychology can call itself a science, and this is a big concession on the part of the spirit. What demands psychology will make on the other natural sciences, and on physics in particular, only the future can tell.
6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
28 Cf. John Read, Prelude to Chemistry, frontispiece.
375
--
Read, John. Prelude to Chemistry. London, 1939.
Reitzenstein, Richard. Poimandres. Leipzig, 1904.
7.08 - Sincerity, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All human sciencesphilosophy, astronomy, mathematics, Chemistry, physicsare seekings for truth. But in the smallest things as in the greatest, truth is necessary.
Little children, do not wait to be grown up before you learn to be truthful: that cannot be done too early; and to remain truthful, it is never too soon to acquire the habit.
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
You cannot learn the whole of Chemistry in one hour.
I shall tell ;*you another story in this connection, for
--
science. I always compare occultism with Chemistry or
physics; for occult "knowledge is very much like scienti-
--
problem or thesis in philosophy or Chemistry. In sports
you are asked to do the same. Choose one item and fix
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
thats a pretty slim clue. Weve got a long, long way to go. The problem of the Chemistry of
the brain desperately needs to be looked at from within this point of view. Thus far, we can
BOOK II. -- PART I. ANTHROPOGENESIS., #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
of Chemistry, or rather alchemy, of mineralogy, geology, physics and astronomy.
Several times the writer has put to herself the question: "Is the story of Exodus -- in its details at least -as narrated in the Old Testament, original? Or is it, like the story of Moses himself and many others,
--
in the windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And if Chemistry is so
little able to rival even the early mediaeval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which,
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
between the teachings of Paracelsus, the "Father of Modern Chemistry," and those of Haeckel, the
Father of the mythical Sozura. We demand no more.
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 627 THE NUMBER SEVEN IN Chemistry.
especially to the Epistle of Peter (I P. ii. 2-5) ought to be conclusive. In the old symbolism, man,
--
music and Chemistry we find a series of seven octaves represented theoretically, of which six are fairly
complete and in ordinary use in both sciences. Thus, to quote Hellenbach: -"It has been established that, from the standpoint of phenomenal law, upon which all our
--
the figures themselves, but also is practically confirmed in Chemistry as in music, in the
latter of which the ear confirms the verdict of the figures. . . . . . The fact that this
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
Occult Vital Chemistry and Bacteriology ... 261
[[Vol. 1, Page]] xii CONTENTS.
--
Metaphysical Chemistry ... 569
What are the Seven Planets? ... 575
--
The "Seventh" in Chemistry ... 585
------XIII. THE MODERN NEBULAR THEORY ... 588
--
** Each of these and many more are probably the missing links of Chemistry. They are known by other
names in Alchemy and to the Occultists who practise in phenomenal powers. It is by combining and
--
that new discoveries in Chemistry have led Mr. Crookes, F.R.S., to admit that Science is yet a thousand
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looked into the philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or thought over them -- modern Chemistry,
owing to observation and discovery, should have unconsciously been forced to adopt and recognize the
--
the phraseology of Chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, and tetratomic, progressing downwards. Let it be
remembered that Fire, Water, and Air, or the "Elements of primary Creation" so-called, are not the
--
being perceptible only to the initiated Dangma's eye. But then, if Chemistry desired to find itself on the
right path, it would have to correct its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists -- which it may
--
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 261 THE OCCULT Chemistry.
kinds; that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw,
--
that will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and physiology are the two great
magicians of the future, who are destined to open the eyes of mankind to the great physical truths.
--
just-born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes in Chemistry -- or primordial Protomateria that evolved
out of itself the Kosmos.
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
contradictory of them, in Chemistry. If the physicist and chemist alike assume the
existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable in bulk and weight, the atom cannot
--
The existence of Ether is accepted by physical astronomy, in ordinary physics, and in Chemistry.
Astronomers, who first began by regarding it as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility, offering no
--
supra). Chemistry deemed it impossible to concede enormous elasticity to the ether without depriving
it of other properties, upon the assumption of which the construction of its modern theories depended.
--
"Celestial Chemistry, from the time of Newton." "Till then the idea was universal, even among the men
of Science, that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached a void," as Le
--
recently been said that 'it holds the same place in Chemistry that the law of gravitation
does in astronomy.'*** This principle is known as the law of Avogadro or
--
This shows that either modern Chemistry or modern physics is entirely wrong in its respective
fundamental principles. For if the assumption of atoms of different specific gravities on the basis of
the atomic theory in physics is deemed absurd, and Chemistry meets, nevertheless, on its opposite basis
(in the question of the formation and transformation of chemical compounds) with "unfailing
--
*** J. P. Cooke, The New Chemistry, p. 13.
**** "It imports that equal volumes of all substances, when in the gaseous state, and under like
--
volume, this cardinal principle of modern theoretical Chemistry is in utter and irreconcilable conflict
with the first proposition of the atomo-mechanical theory -- namely, the absolute equality of the
--
analysis as opposed to the proximate in Chemistry, occult science may be less well-informed as to the
behaviour of compound elements in various cases of physical correlations: still, it is immeasurably
--
constantly renewed by the vital Chemistry; a matter as easily disposed of as the breath,
after it has served its purpose -- a new flood of light breaks on the Intelligence ." . . . .
--
modern Chemistry. As in the realm of matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is
cognized on the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of the perfectly
--
every year more difficult; and with every year also, Chemistry, above all the other sciences,
approaches nearer and nearer the realm of the Occult in nature. It is assimilating the very truths taught
--
concerns the fundamental principles of Chemistry, a subject which may lead us to admit
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[[Vol. 1, Page]] 547 OCCULT Chemistry.
how in justice are we to exclude the series of elemental bodies or meta-elements made
--
60 or 70 elements accepted in Chemistry, can no longer cover the ground. Their name, apparently, is
legion, but as the so-called "periodic theory" stands in the way of an unlimited multiplication of
--
If we understand rightly, Chemistry speaks of fourteen groupings of primitive atoms -- lithium,
beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon,
--
which is beyond Chemistry, but within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a man or an
animal whose astral "vital body" has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the
--
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 567 METAPHYSICAL Chemistry.
English geologists*, as the nature of matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he
--
** Modern Chemistry.
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 581 A CHASE AFTER THE PRIMAL MATTER.
occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all -- Chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not
excluding astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as Chemistry can. Two proofs of
it are to be found in the world of Science -- two great chemists, each among the greatest in his own
--
[[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------* Says Mr. Crookes in the same address: "The first riddle which we encounter in Chemistry is: 'What
are the elements?' Of the attempts hitherto made to define or explain an element, none satisfy the
--
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 585 THE "SEVENTH" IN Chemistry.
energetic gas which chemists have only isolated within the last month or two, would
--
Thus inductive Science, in its Branches of Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, while advancing
timidly towards the conquest of Nature's secrets in her final effects on our terrestrial plane, recedes to
--
Now, the writer humbly confesses complete ignorance of modern Chemistry and its mysteries. But she
is pretty well acquainted with the Occult doctrine with regard to correspondences of types and
--
in Chemistry, is a law in Occult Sciences. Every well-read Occultist knows that the seventh and fourth
members -- whether in a septenary chain of worlds, the septenary hierarchy of angels, or in the
--
this is the problem that Chemistry is trying to solve; and it must succeed sooner or later in the task,
accepting nolens volens, when it does, the esoteric teaching. But when this does happen, it will kill the
--
could anticipate Chemistry in proving the existence of the fact, if it could show a planetary nebula
exhibiting a spectrum of three or four bright lines, gradually condensing and transforming into a star,
--
from physics to Chemistry and physiology, toward some doctrine of evolution and development, of
which the facts of Darwinism will form part, but what ultimate aspect this doctrine will take, there is
--
department of Chemistry, the invariable law of this evolution of atoms -- from their "protylean" state
down to that of a physical and then a chemical particle (or molecule) -- cannot well reject the same as a
--
[[Vol. 1, Page]] 621 THE Chemistry OF THE FUTURE.
examining the lecture delivered by Professor Crookes a short time ago upon the so-called elements of
modern Chemistry. This lecture will give you some idea of the way in which these Elements spring
from Vishwanara,* the most objective of these three principles, which seems to stand in the place of
--
"Gods and intelligent Conscious Monads." But Chemistry is now on its ascending plane, thanks to one
of its highest European representatives. It is impossible for it to go back to that day when materialism
--
evolution under conditions which Chemistry has not yet been able to produce.' . . . "And the poet has
forestalled the philosopher. Milton ('Paradise Lost,' Book V.) makes the Archangel Raphael say to
--
manifestation." (De Placit. Philos.) The revolution produced in old Chemistry by Avogadro was the
first page in the Volume of New Chemistry. Mr. Crookes has now turned the second page, and is
boldly pointing to what may be the last. For once protyle accepted and recognized -- as invisible Ether
was, both being logical and scientific necessities -- Chemistry will have virtually ceased to live: it will
reappear in its reincarnation as New Alchemy, or META Chemistry. The discoverer of
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
But what are these "ELEMENTS" whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry
and Physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer
BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up with regards to the West, to such a degree theres many reasons, and not all of them are validis that, being still grounded in a dream, they can see that the rootless, questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture, and it does. Westerners, uswe undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect. Im not complaining about that. There isnt anything easy that can be done about it. But its still a sort of fruitful catastrophe, and it has real effects on peoples lives. Its not some abstract thing. Lots of times when Ive been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues. Its not just some psychiatric condition. Its not just that theyre tapped off of normal because their brain Chemistry is faultyalthough, sometimes that happens to be the case. Its that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life, and theyre not sure why its reasonable to continue with it. They can feel the terrible, negative meanings of life, but they are sceptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings of it.
I had one client whos a very brilliant artist. As long as he didnt think, he was fine. Hed go and create, and he was really good at being an artist. He had that personality that was continually creating, and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating. But he sawed the branch off that he was sitting on, as soon as he started to think about what he was doing. Hed start to criticize what he was doing the utility of iteven though it was self-evidently useful. Then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create. He always struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced, in some way, from your Beingdivorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your Being. Its not a good thing.
Liber 111 - The Book of Wisdom - LIBER ALEPH VEL CXI, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Noise of thy Machine. Now Chemistry, or Al-Chem-y meaneth the Egyptian
Science, and the true Magick of Egypt hath this for its Foundation. We
MoM References, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Multhauf, Robert P. (1967). The origins of Chemistry. London: Oldbourne.
Nader, A., McNally, R.J., & Wiegartz, P.S. (1996). Implicit memory bias for threat in posttraumatic stress disorder. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 20, 625-635.
Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The doctrine of opposite moments of thought or of progression by antagonism, further assists us in framing a scheme or system of the sciences. The negation of one gives birth to another of them. The double notions are the joints which hold them together. The simple is developed into the complex, the complex returns again into the simple. Beginning with the highest notion of mind or thought, we may descend by a series of negations to the first generalizations of sense. Or again we may begin with the simplest elements of sense and proceed upwards to the highest being or thought. Metaphysic is the negation or absorption of physiologyphysiology of Chemistry Chemistry of mechanical philosophy. Similarly in mechanics, when we can no further go we arrive at Chemistrywhen Chemistry becomes organic we arrive at physiology: when we pass from the outward and animal to the inward nature of man we arrive at moral and metaphysical philosophy. These sciences have each of them their own methods and are pursued independently of one another. But to the mind of the thinker they are all onelatent in one anotherdeveloped out of one another.
This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and infinite are no more true than the relative and finite, and that they must alike be negatived before we arrive at a true absolute or a true infinite. The conceptions of the infinite and absolute as ordinarily understood are tiresome because they are unmeaning, but there is no peculiar sanctity or mystery in them. We might as well make an infinitesimal series of fractions or a perpetually recurring decimal the object of our worship. They are the widest and also the thinnest of human ideas, or, in the language of logicians, they have the greatest extension and the least comprehension. Of all words they may be truly said to be the most inflated with a false meaning. They have been handed down from one philosopher to another until they have acquired a religious character. They seem also to derive a sacredness from their association with the Divine Being. Yet they are the poorest of the predicates under which we describe himsignifying no more than this, that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and tending to obscure his higher attri butes of wisdom, goodness, truth.
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
DR. MANILAL: They must be somewhere. (Laughter) It is as in Chemistry: in
some form they exist somewhere. According to science, nothing can be lost.
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
the Chemistry of a simple muscle twitch. But often in the history of
ideas we find two opposite methods at work: the 'downward* approach
--
they are, physics and Chemistry could not have evolved.
I have tried to combine both methods by choosing as my starting
--
sciences like Chemistry through bio Chemistry to biology, then through
medicine which is, alas, a much less exact science to psychology,
--
to the laws of physics and Chemistry. The practical joker and the clown
specialize in tricks which exploit the mechanical forces of gravity and
--
of Friedrich August von Kekule, Professor of Chemistry in Ghent,
who, one afternoon in 1865, fell asleep and dreamt what was probably
--
found in the whole range of organic Chemistry' and which, in fact, is
one of the cornerstones of modern science. Put in a somewhat
--
and Chemistry too, the best we can do by so-called 'crucial experiments'
is to confirm a prediction but not the theory on which the prediction
--
account for light, colour, radiant heat, Hertzian waves. Chemistry was
swallowed up by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and
--
forms of matter, the 'elements' of Chemistry, suffered the same fate,
as they were all found to be constructed out of the same building blocks
--
of Chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river
as it approaches the estuary to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose
--
to be a will-o'-the-wisp, even in inorganic Chemistry; in the organism,
the firing of a single nerve-cell turns out to be not an event, but a
--
ment. Although the Chemistry of induction is still a ^problematic
affair, it seems safe to assume, as Mittasch has pointed out, that 'organic
--
the perfect adaptation of an organism to the temperature and Chemistry
of the environment is to die. In fact, the animal does not merely adapt
--
more advanced symbolic skills mathematics or Chemistry, or Law
are learned in explicit verbal form. They may be acquired by rote-
--
magnetism and electricity, of physics and Chemistry, of corpuscles and
6$$ THE ACT OF CREATION
--
Galvani's frogs, led to a parallel synthesis of electricity and Chemistry.
The battery gave the experimenters for the first time ample supplies
--
light, heat, and other electro-magnetic radiations; of Chemistry, bio-
Chemistry, and atomic physics. This development was, as we have seen
--
fessor of Chemistry in Lille; and no sooner was he installed than
Monsieur Bigo, an industrialist engaged in the production of alcohol
--
Findlay, A., A Hundred Years of Chemistry. London: Duckworth, 1948 (2nd ed.).
Fischberg, M. and Blackler, A. W., in Scientific American, September 1961, pp.
Theaetetus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
IV. We admit that there is no perfect or ideal Psychology. It is not a whole in the same sense in which Chemistry, Physiology, or Mathematics are wholes: that is to say, it is not a connected unity of knowledge. Compared with the wealth of other sciences, it rests upon a small number of facts; and when we go beyond these, we fall into conjectures and verbal discussions. The facts themselves are disjointed; the causes of them run up into other sciences, and we have no means of tracing them from one to the other. Yet it may be true of this, as of other beginnings of knowledge, that the attempt to put them together has tested the truth of them, and given a stimulus to the enquiry into them.
Psychology should be natural, not technical. It should take the form which is the most intelligible to the common understanding, because it has to do with common things, which are familiar to us all. It should aim at no more than every reflecting man knows or can easily verify for himself. When simple and unpretentious, it is least obscured by words, least liable to fall under the influence of Physiology or Metaphysic. It should argue, not from exceptional, but from ordinary phenomena. It should be careful to distinguish the higher and the lower elements of human nature, and not allow one to be veiled in the disguise of the other, lest through the slippery nature of language we should pass imperceptibly from good to evil, from nature in the higher to nature in the neutral or lower sense. It should assert consistently the unity of the human faculties, the unity of knowledge, the unity of God and law. The difference between the will and the affections and between the reason and the passions should also be recognized by it.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
5 - Chemistry AND PHILOSOPHY
6 - HERMETIC CABALA
--
al and the noun chimie, understand it to mean Chemistry par excellence or the hyper Chemistry
of modem occultists. If we had to bring in our personal opinion in this debate, we would say
--
philosophy while building the basis of our Chemistry. Seton, Wenceslas Lavinius of Moravia,
Zacharius, and Paracelsus are, in the 16th century, the only known heirs to the Egyptian
--
positive science, the only one permitted and taught today, is a spiritualistic Chemistry, for it
allows us to catch a glimpse of God through the darkness of substance.
--
its formulas a logical and true explanation of the studied phenomena. "Physical Chemistry",
writes A. Etard (1) , "lures the majority of research minds. It is the one which touches most
--
systems and our formulas. However, by its very importance, this kind of Chemistry is the most
abstract and the most mysterious that exists. During the short moments of a creative thought,
--
hidden dynamism of things, which deprives modem Chemistry of the philosophical character
alchemy possesses. "You believe", writes Monsieur Henri Helier to Monsieur L. Olivier (4) ,
--
gathered an enormous clientele in Chemistry. Just try to trust it; it is an unfaithful depository, a
usurer. You entrust it with a perfectly healthy object, endowed with incontestable natural
--
Positive in its facts, Chemistry remains negative in its spirit. And this precisely differentiates it
from the hermetic science, whose proper domain consists above all in the study of efficient
--
(1) A. Etard; Revue Annuelle de Chimnie pure (Annual Review of Pure Chemistry), in Revue des Sciences, Sept.
30, 1896, p. 775.
--
Since Lavoisier, all the authors who have written on the history of Chemistry agree to profess
that our Chemistry comes by direct affiliation from old alchemy. Consequently, the origin of
the one is confused with that of the other, to such an extent that modern science would owe
--
fact, that the real ancestor of our modern Chemistry is ancient spagyrics and not the hermetic
science itself. There is indeed a profound abyss between spagyrics and alchemy. This is
--
who provided first the spagyrists and later modern Chemistry with the facts, methods, and
operations they needed. These men, tormented with a desire to search everywhere and to learn
--
demonstrating by real and controllable facts, that our Chemistry owes everything to spagyrists
and archemists and nothing, absolutely nothing, to hermetic Philosophy.
--
possible to do so, that the ancestor of modern Chemistry is not the old and simple alchemy but
ancient spagyrics, enriched with successive contri butions from Greek, Arabic, and medieval
--
treatise on The Origin and the Progress of Chemistry (4) . It is known that the houses, the
churches, and the hospitals built by Nicolas Flamel served as turning points for the
--
likely, just like Chemistry, to develop and progress, and not be the empirical acquisition of a
manufacturing secret of precious metals; (2) that alchemy and Chemistry are two positive,
exact, and real sciences, although different from each other as much in practice as in theory;
(3) that, for these very reasons, Chemistry could not claim an alchemical origin; (4) finally,
that in the innumerable, more or less marvelous properties attri buted in the lump by
--
matter. We know, from Chemistry, that salts, formed from an acid and a base, reveal through
decomposition the volatility of the one and the fixity of the other. As salt partakes both of the
--
(10) Ferdin and Hoefer: Histoire de la Chimie (History of Chemistry); Paris, Firmin Dido, 1866, p. 248.
(11) La Lumiere sortant par soy-mesme des Tenebres (The Light coming by itself out of the Darkness), op. cit.
--
No one could contest the significance and the preponderance of the dissolution, in Chemistry
as well as in alchemy. It is in the first rank of laboratory operations, and it can be said that
Timaeus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Of all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world. The obscurity arises in the infancy of physical science, out of the confusion of theological, mathematical, and physiological notions, out of the desire to conceive the whole of nature without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and from a greater perception of similarities which lie on the surface than of differences which are hidden from view. To bring sense under the control of reason; to find some way through the mist or labyrinth of appearances, either the highway of mathematics, or more devious paths suggested by the analogy of man with the world, and of the world with man; to see that all things have a cause and are tending towards an endthis is the spirit of the ancient physical philosopher. He has no notion of trying an experiment and is hardly capable of observing the curiosities of nature which are 'tumbling out at his feet,' or of interpreting even the most obvious of them. He is driven back from the nearer to the more distant, from particulars to generalities, from the earth to the stars. He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks to guide by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have the ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon us. For he is hanging between matter and mind; he is under the dominion at the same time both of sense and of abstractions; his impressions are taken almost at random from the outside of nature; he sees the light, but not the objects which are revealed by the light; and he brings into juxtaposition things which to us appear wide as the poles asunder, because he finds nothing between them. He passes abruptly from persons to ideas and numbers, and from ideas and numbers to persons,from the heavens to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather does not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He contrasts the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the imperfect representation of them (Rep.), and he does not always require strict accuracy even in applications of number and figure (Rep.). His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, which he uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope; the great science of Chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by an effort that the modern thinker can brea the the atmosphere of the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration, to have anticipated the truth.
The influence with the Timaeus has exercised upon posterity is due partly to a misunderstanding. In the supposed depths of this dialogue the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they elicited doctrines quite at variance with the spirit of Plato. Believing that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost, or had received his wisdom from Moses, they seemed to find in his writings the Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church, the creation of the world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the personality of God or of mind, and the immortality of the soul. All religions and philosophies met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria, and the Neo-Platonists had a method of interpretation which could elicit any meaning out of any words. They were really incapable of distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and another between Aristotle and Plato, or between the serious thoughts of Plato and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in his theology and were under the dominion of his name, while that which was truly great and truly characteristic in him, his effort to realize and connect abstractions, was not understood by them at all. Yet the genius of Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon the East, and a Greek element of thought and language overlaid and partly reduced to order the chaos of Orientalism. And kindred spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they were acquainted with his writings only through the medium of a Latin translation, were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find 'God and his word everywhere insinuated' in them (August. Confess.)
--
Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be added, and the unconscious influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they appeared to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a child and also a mana child in the range of his attainments, but also a great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often anticipations of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers; his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was unequal; while in some branches, such as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency, there were others, such as Chemistry, electricity, mechanics, of which the very names were unknown to him. He was the natural enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still retained their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception of principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected. He was always tending to argue from what was near to what was remote, from what was known to what was unknown, from man to the universe, and back again from the universe to man. While he was arranging the world, he was arranging the forms of thought in his own mind; and the light from within and the light from without often crossed and helped to confuse one another. He might be compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of the flute.
The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate between mythology and philosophy and had a great influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them; they were to physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history. They made men think of the world as a whole; they carried the mind back into the infinity of past time; they suggested the first observation of the effects of fire and water on the earth's surface. To the ancient physics they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of art and music which had lasted, 'not in word only, but in very truth, for ten thousand years' (Laws); he was aware that natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he seems to have supposed that the course of events was recurring rather than progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were other civilisations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas.
--
When in modern times we contemplate the heavens, a certain amount of scientific truth imperceptibly blends, even with the cursory glance of an unscientific person. He knows that the earth is revolving round the sun, and not the sun around the earth. He does not imagine the earth to be the centre of the universe, and he has some conception of Chemistry and the cognate sciences. A very different aspect of nature would have been present to the mind of the early Greek philosopher. He would have beheld the earth a surface only, not mirrored, however faintly, in the glass of science, but indissolubly connected with some theory of one, two, or more elements. He would have seen the world pervaded by number and figure, animated by a principle of motion, immanent in a principle of rest. He would have tried to construct the universe on a quantitative principle, seeming to find in endless combinations of geometrical figures or in the infinite variety of their sizes a sufficient account of the multiplicity of phenomena. To these a priori speculations he would add a rude conception of matter and his own immediate experience of health and disease. His cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and unequal, being the first attempt to impress form and order on the primaeval chaos of human knowledge. He would see all things as in a dream.
The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr. Whewell and others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong methods of enquiry; and their progress in moral and political philosophy has been sometimes contrasted with their supposed failure in physical investigations. 'They had plenty of ideas,' says Dr. Whewell, 'and plenty of facts; but their ideas did not accurately represent the facts with which they were acquainted.' This is a very crude and misleading way of describing ancient science. It is the mistake of an uneducated personuneducated, that is, in the higher sense of the wordwho imagines every one else to be like himself and explains every other age by his own. No doubt the ancients often fell into strange and fanciful errors: the time had not yet arrived for the slower and surer path of the modern inductive philosophy. But it remains to be shown that they could have done more in their age and country; or that the contri butions which they made to the sciences with which they were acquainted are not as great upon the whole as those made by their successors. There is no single step in astronomy as great as that of the nameless Pythagorean who first conceived the world to be a body moving round the sun in space: there is no truer or more comprehensive principle than the application of mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies, and to the particles of matter. The ancients had not the instruments which would have enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did more for physical science by asserting the supremacy of mathematics than Aristotle or his disciples by their collections of facts. When the thinkers of modern times, following Bacon, undervalue or disparage the speculations of ancient philosophers, they seem wholly to forget the conditions of the world and of the human mind, under which they carried on their investigations. When we accuse them of being under the influence of words, do we suppose that we are altogether free from this illusion? When we remark that Greek physics soon became stationary or extinct, may we not observe also that there have been and may be again periods in the history of modern philosophy which have been barren and unproductive? We might as well maintain that Greek art was not real or great, because it had nihil simile aut secundum, as say that Greek physics were a failure because they admire no subsequent progress.
--
To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1) that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the early physicists; (2) that the development of animals out of fishes who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held by Anaximander in the sixth century before Christ (Plut. Symp. Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other stars revolving in space around the sun or a central fire; (4) that the beginnings of Chemistry are discernible in the 'similar particles' of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were aware that musical notes depended on the relative length or tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were measured by ratios of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded the world; and even qualitative differences were supposed to have their origin in number and figure; (8) the annihilation of matter was denied by several of them, and the seeming disappearance of it held to be a transformation only. For, although one of these discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess, taken together they seem to imply a great advance and almost maturity of natural knowledge.
We should also remember, when we attri bute to the ancients hasty generalizations and delusions of language, that physical philosophy and metaphysical too have been guilty of similar fallacies in quite recent times. We by no means distinguish clearly between mind and body, between ideas and facts. Have not many discussions arisen about the Atomic theory in which a point has been confused with a material atom? Have not the natures of things been explained by imaginary entities, such as life or phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary, sometimes as a positive or malignant principle? The 'idols' of Bacon are nearly as common now as ever; they are inherent in the human mind, and when they have the most complete dominion over us, we are least able to perceive them. We recognize them in the ancients, but we fail to see them in ourselves.
--
The greatest 'divination' of the ancients was the supremacy which they assigned to mathematics in all the realms of nature; for in all of them there is a foundation of mechanics. Even physiology partakes of figure and number; and Plato is not wrong in attri buting them to the human frame, but in the omission to observe how little could be explained by them. Thus we may remark in passing that the most fanciful of ancient philosophies is also the most nearly verified in fact. The fortunate guess that the world is a sum of numbers and figures has been the most fruitful of anticipations. The 'diatonic' scale of the Pythagoreans and Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the distances of the planets from one another was to be found in mathematical proportions. The doctrine that the heavenly bodies all move in a circle is known by us to be erroneous; but without such an error how could the human mind have comprehended the heavens? Astronomy, even in modern times, has made far greater progress by the high a priori road than could have been attained by any other. Yet, strictly speakingand the remark applies to ancient physics generallythis high a priori road was based upon a posteriori grounds. For there were no facts of which the ancients were so well assured by experience as facts of number. Having observed that they held good in a few instances, they applied them everywhere; and in the complexity, of which they were capable, found the explanation of the equally complex phenomena of the universe. They seemed to see them in the least things as well as in the greatest; in atoms, as well as in suns and stars; in the human body as well as in external nature. And now a favourite speculation of modern Chemistry is the explanation of qualitative difference by quantitative, which is at present verified to a certain extent and may hereafter be of far more universal application. What is this but the atoms of Democritus and the triangles of Plato? The ancients should not be wholly deprived of the credit of their guesses because they were unable to prove them. May they not have had, like the animals, an instinct of something more than they knew?
Besides general notions we seem to find in the Timaeus some more precise approximations to the discoveries of modern physical science. First, the doctrine of equipoise. Plato affirms, almost in so many words, that nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever a particle is displaced, the rest push and thrust one another until equality is restored. We must remember that these ideas were not derived from any definite experiment, but were the original reflections of man, fresh from the first observation of nature. The latest word of modern philosophy is continuity and development, but to Plato this is the beginning and foundation of science; there is nothing that he is so strongly persuaded of as that the world is one, and that all the various existences which are contained in it are only the transformations of the same soul of the world acting on the same matter. He would have readily admitted that out of the protoplasm all things were formed by the gradual process of creation; but he would have insisted that mind and intelligencenot meaning by this, however, a conscious mind or personwere prior to them, and could alone have created them. Into the workings of this eternal mind or intelligence he does not enter further; nor would there have been any use in attempting to investigate the things which no eye has seen nor any human language can express.
--- Overview of noun chemistry
The noun chemistry has 3 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (5) chemistry, chemical science ::: (the science of matter; the branch of the natural sciences dealing with the composition of substances and their properties and reactions)
2. chemistry ::: (the chemical composition and properties of a substance or object; "the chemistry of soil")
3. chemistry, interpersonal chemistry, alchemy ::: (the way two individuals relate to each other; "their chemistry was wrong from the beginning ::: they hated each other"; "a mysterious alchemy brought them together")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun chemistry
3 senses of chemistry
Sense 1
chemistry, chemical science
=> natural science
=> science, scientific discipline
=> discipline, subject, subject area, subject field, field, field of study, study, bailiwick
=> knowledge domain, knowledge base, domain
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
chemistry
=> substance
=> matter
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> part, portion, component part, component, constituent
=> relation
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
chemistry, interpersonal chemistry, alchemy
=> social relation
=> relation
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun chemistry
1 of 3 senses of chemistry
Sense 1
chemistry, chemical science
=> immunochemistry, chemoimmunology
=> organic chemistry
=> inorganic chemistry
=> physical chemistry
=> electrochemistry
=> femtochemistry
=> geochemistry
=> photochemistry
=> radiochemistry, nuclear chemistry
=> surface chemistry
=> thermochemistry
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun chemistry
3 senses of chemistry
Sense 1
chemistry, chemical science
=> natural science
Sense 2
chemistry
=> substance
Sense 3
chemistry, interpersonal chemistry, alchemy
=> social relation
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun chemistry
3 senses of chemistry
Sense 1
chemistry, chemical science
-> natural science
=> life science, bioscience
=> chemistry, chemical science
=> physics, natural philosophy
=> physics, physical science
=> earth science
=> cosmography
Sense 2
chemistry
-> substance
=> body substance
=> protoplasm, living substance
=> chemistry
=> material, stuff
=> phlogiston
=> mixture
=> atom
=> chemical element, element
=> activator
=> substrate
=> element
=> medium
=> medium
=> fluid
=> volatile
=> essence
Sense 3
chemistry, interpersonal chemistry, alchemy
-> social relation
=> relations, dealings
=> professional relation
=> politics, political relation
=> chemistry, interpersonal chemistry, alchemy
--- Grep of noun chemistry
biochemistry
chemistry
chemistry department
chemistry lab
chemistry laboratory
department of chemistry
electrochemistry
femtochemistry
geochemistry
immunochemistry
immunohistochemistry
inorganic chemistry
interpersonal chemistry
nuclear chemistry
organic chemistry
photochemistry
physical chemistry
phytochemistry
pyrochemistry
radiochemistry
surface chemistry
thermochemistry
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Wikipedia - Elfriede Hartmann -- Viennese chemistry student
Wikipedia - Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry -- Scientific award given by the American Chemical Society
Wikipedia - Emanuel Merck Lectureship -- chemistry research award conferred by Technische UniversitM-CM-$t Darmstadt and Merck KGaA
Wikipedia - Emil Wohlwill -- German-Jewish engineer of electrochemistry
Wikipedia - Emotional Chemistry -- Doctor Who novel by Simon A. Forward
Wikipedia - Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry -- English-language multi-volume encyclopedia published by John Wiley & Sons
Wikipedia - Environmental chemistry -- The scientific study of the chemical and phenomena that occur in natural places
Wikipedia - Equilibrium chemistry
Wikipedia - Etymology of chemistry
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Wikipedia - Forensic chemistry -- Forensic application of the study of chemistry
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Wikipedia - Garvan-Olin Medal -- Chemistry award
Wikipedia - General chemistry
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Wikipedia - Glossary of chemistry
Wikipedia - Glyoxalase system -- Biochemistry; detoxification enzyme system
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Wikipedia - Green chemistry -- Research Field in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
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Wikipedia - Histochemistry
Wikipedia - History of biochemistry
Wikipedia - History of chemistry
Wikipedia - Houben-Weyl Methods of Organic Chemistry -- Chemistry encyclopedia established by Theodor Weyl
Wikipedia - Hydrochemistry
Wikipedia - Hypercycle (chemistry)
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Wikipedia - Iatrochemistry
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Wikipedia - Index of chemistry articles -- Wikipedia index
Wikipedia - Ingrid del Carmen Montes Gonzalez -- American chemistry professor
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Wikipedia - Instrumental chemistry
Wikipedia - Intercalation (chemistry) -- Reversible insertion of an ion into a material with layered structure
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Wikipedia - International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
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Wikipedia - Iota Sigma Pi -- American honor society for women in chemistry
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Wikipedia - IUPAC nomenclature of chemistry
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Wikipedia - Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry -- Analytical chemistry technique
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Wikipedia - List of chemistry awards -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of chemistry journals -- Wikipedia list article
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Wikipedia - List of chemistry societies -- Wikipedia list article
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Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Chemistry)
Wikipedia - List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry -- Wikipedia list article
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Wikipedia - Nuclear chemistry
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Wikipedia - Organolanthanide chemistry
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Wikipedia - Salt (chemistry)
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Wikipedia - Structural chemistry
Wikipedia - Substrate (biochemistry)
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Wikipedia - Supramolecular chemistry
Wikipedia - Surface chemistry of neural implants
Wikipedia - Surface chemistry
Wikipedia - Suspension (chemistry) -- Heterogeneous mixture of solid particles dispersed in a medium
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Wikipedia - Thermochemistry
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Wikipedia - Toxicology -- Branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine
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Wikipedia - Ursula Rothlisberger -- Professor of computational chemistry
Wikipedia - Valence (chemistry)
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Wikipedia - Viola Birss -- Electrochemistry researcher
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Wikipedia - Volatility (chemistry) -- Tendency of a substance to vaporize
Wikipedia - VSEPR theory -- Theoretical model used in chemistry
Wikipedia - Webe Kadima -- Associate professor of chemistry
Wikipedia - Wet chemistry
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry -- WikiProject for coverage of chemistry
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:WikiProject Physical Chemistry -- Wikimedia subject-area collaboration
Wikipedia - Willard Gibbs Award -- US-American chemistry award
Wikipedia - Wolf Prize in Chemistry
Wikipedia - Women in chemistry
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Major Dad (1989 - 1993) - Major John MacGillis is a conservative, by-the-book, die-hard Marine. Polly Cooper is a pacifistic, liberal journalist. Nonetheless, when the two meet, there's instant and intense chemistry between them and they get married less than 24 hours later. Now Polly (and her kids from a previous marriage)...
Love Connection (1983 - 1993) - Woolery asks questions about what happened on their date. Sometimes, the two really hit it off ,and the two could not wait to see each other again. Woolery would invite the date onstage to reunite with the bachelor(ette). Other times, they simply had no chemistry or the date came straight from Hell...
Breaking Bad (2008 - 2013) - A bored chemistry teacher(Bryan Cranston),upon learning he has cancer,decides to"Break Bad" and becomes a drug dealer.
The Nutty Professor(1996) - Eddie Murphy gives one of Jerry Lewis' best-remembered vehicles a 1990s overhaul in this hit comedy. Sherman Klump (Murphy) is a college professor and respected biochemistry researcher who is kind, considerate, and a genuinely nice guy. Sherman is also appallingly overweight; coupled with the fact t...
Beethoven's 2nd(1993) - The gargantuan St. Bernard finds love in this sequel to the box-office hit. Beethoven happens to meet Missy, another St. Bernard, in the park and the two find they share a certain chemistry. Unfortunately, Missy is being held captive by Regina (Debi Mazar), a spiteful ex-wife attempting to leverage...
Big Hero 6(2014) - Robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada learns to harness his geniusthanks to his brilliant brother Tadashi and their like-minded friends: adrenaline junkie Go Go Tamago, neatnik Wasabi, chemistry whiz Honey Lemon and fanboy Fred. When a devastating turn of events catapults them into the midst of a dangerous...
The Nutty Professor (1963)(1963) - Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis) is a college professor with a problem. Clumsy, awkward, inarticulate and unattractive, Julius is a hopeless case when it comes to women -- but he's desperate to impress beautiful student Stella (Stella Stevens). Fortunately, he does know something about chemistry and decide...
Nobel Son(2007) - Barkley Michaelson is in a deep life rut. He's struggling to finish his PhD thesis when his father, the learned Eli Michaelson, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Barkley and his mother, Sarah, a renowned forensic psychiatrist, now have the ill-fortune of living with a man-eating monster whose phil...
The Absent-Minded Professor(1961) - Professor Brainard (pronounced BRAY-nerd) is an absent-minded professor of physical chemistry at Medfield College who invents a substance that gains energy when it strikes a hard surface. This discovery follows some blackboard scribbling in which he reverses a sign in the equation for enthalpy to en...
The Nude Vampire(1970) - Wealthy and decadent industrialist Georges Radamante rules over a strange secret suicide cult and wants to achieve immortality by figuring out a way to share the biochemistry of a young mute orphaned vampire woman. Complications ensue when Radamante's son Pierre finds out what's going on and falls f...
Breaking Bad ::: TV-MA | 49min | Crime, Drama, Thriller | TV Series (20082013) -- A high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer turns to manufacturing and selling methamphetamine in order to secure his family's future. Creator:
Breaking Bad ::: TV-MA | 49min | Crime, Drama, Thriller | TV Series (2008-2013) Episode Guide 62 episodes Breaking Bad Poster -- A high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer turns to manufacturing and selling methamphetamine in order to secure his family's future. Creator:
Famous in Love ::: TV-14 | 42min | Drama, Romance | TV Series (20172018) -- A college student's big break in a Hollywood blockbuster leaves her navigating through an undeniable chemistry. Creators: I. Marlene King, Rebecca Serle
Keith (2008) ::: 7.4/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 35min | Drama, Romance | 13 September 2008 (USA) -- Natalie, head of her curriculum activities in high school and riding on a tennis scholarship for college, gets Keith as her Chemistry lab partner. As Natalie can be uptight, Keith proves to be the opposite, even while hiding a secret. Director: Todd Kessler Writers:
Samba (2014) ::: 6.7/10 -- R | 1h 58min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 15 October 2014 (France) -- Senegalese Samba has worked 10 years in France. He's arrested and befriends the woman helping him with legal matters as volunteer after a burnout at work. He's released after being told to leave France. Chemistry? Directors: Olivier Nakache, ric Toledano Writers:
The Nutty Professor (1963) ::: 6.7/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 47min | Comedy, Romance, Sci-Fi | 7 June 1963 (USA) -- A timid, nearsighted chemistry teacher discovers a magical potion that can transform him into a suave and handsome Romeo. The Jekyll and Hyde game works well enough until the concoction starts to wear off at the most embarrassing times. Director: Jerry Lewis Writers:
Vexed ::: TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Crime, Mystery | TV Series (20102012) Two Detectives Jack and Georgina who share chemistry but have complicated personal lives. Creator: Howard Overman Stars:
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Inazuma Eleven Go: Galaxy -- -- OLM -- 43 eps -- Game -- Shounen Sports Super Power -- Inazuma Eleven Go: Galaxy Inazuma Eleven Go: Galaxy -- After fighting to free the game of soccer in Japan from the Fifth Sector, the country's soccer squads can once again look forward to stepping onto the field. However, a new challenge will emerge for Japanese players in the form of the Football Frontier International Vision 2, a new tournament that will bring together the best teams each country can assemble. -- -- Tenma Matsukaze and his Raimon teammates, Takuto Shindou and Kyousuke Tsurugi, are once again part of the action as they have been selected to play for the Japanese representative, Inazuma Japan. Much to their surprise, the coach selects eight other players that have no previous experience playing soccer! -- -- Team Inazuma Japan will have a huge mountain to climb, building chemistry and skills as they go along. What they don’t know is that the tournament will set the stage for something much bigger, something out of this world in Inazuma Eleven Go: Galaxy! -- TV - May 8, 2013 -- 33,690 6.63
Lovely� -- Complex -- -- Toei Animation -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Romance Shoujo -- Lovely� -- Complex Lovely� -- Complex -- Love is unusual for Koizumi Risa and Ootani Atsushi, who are both striving to find their ideal partner in high school—172 cm tall Koizumi is much taller than the average girl, and Ootani is much shorter than the average guy at 156 cm. To add to their plights, their crushes fall in love with each other, leaving Koizumi and Ootani comically flustered and heartbroken. To make matters worse, they're even labeled as a comedy duo by their homeroom teacher due to their personalities and the stark difference in their heights, and their classmates even think of their arguments as sketches. -- -- Lovely� -- Complex follows Koizumi and Ootani as they encourage each other in finding love and become close friends. Apart from their ridiculous antics, they soon find out an unexpected similarity in their music and fashion tastes. Maybe they possess a chemistry yet unknown, but could love ever bloom between the mismatched pair? -- -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- TV - Apr 7, 2007 -- 452,926 8.05
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