Passages about nature and the cosmos

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.

Solon tells Croesus that no one can be called happy while he still lives, since a god can throw down the most fortunate man at the end, and only a finished life can be judged.

This proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Nothing can ever be begotten of nothing by divine will.

The existence of God can be proved in five ways.

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

Nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute.

Motion is the fulfilment of what exists potentially, in so far as it exists potentially.

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

All men by nature desire to know.

There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses.

Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes and never is?

The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.

The soul is the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially in it.

If the eye were an animal, sight would have been its soul.

A point is that which has no part.

Let the following be postulated: to draw a straight line from any point to any point.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.

I began to think whether there might not be a motion, as it were, in a circle.

The heart of creatures is the foundation of life, the prince of all, the sun of their microcosm, on which all vegetation does depend, from whence all vigour and strength does flow.

The nature of an individual substance is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to comprehend and to allow the deduction of all the predicates of the subject to which the notion is attributed.

Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way.

Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.

An idea can be like nothing but an idea.

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment perilous, and judgement difficult.

It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth, but side by side with Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia.

It is our purpose to demonstrate for the five planets, as we did for the sun and moon, that all their apparent irregularities can be represented by uniform circular motions, since these alone are proper to the divine.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Each of the organs attracts the juice which is proper to it, as the lodestone attracts iron.

In the middle of all sits the sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once?

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

The orbit of a planet is an ellipse, with the sun at one of the two foci.

A line joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.

Any problem in geometry can easily be reduced to such terms that a knowledge of the lengths of certain straight lines is sufficient for its construction.

Taking one line which I shall call unity in order to relate it as closely as possible to numbers, the product of two lines may be taken as a line.

The spaces described by a body falling from rest with a uniformly accelerated motion are to each other as the squares of the time intervals employed in traversing these distances.

If two stones of different weight are tied together, the slower should retard the faster and the faster hurry the slower, so that the pair moves more slowly than the heavier alone, and yet the pair is heavier than either.

By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.

Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and their desire, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to want and to will.

My design in this book is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments.

The light of the sun consists of rays differently refrangible.

The monad is nothing but a simple substance which enters into composites; simple, that is to say, without parts.

Monads have no windows through which anything could come in or go out.

Nothing is created, either in the operations of art or in those of nature, and it may be laid down as a principle that in every operation there is an equal quantity of matter before and after.

We cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language which belongs to it.

I have at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic curve or line of force, and in magnetising a ray of light.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

Call me Ishmael.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters.

My friend, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger: the doom of mortals overtook him.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the ordering of time.

You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on.

If someone should demonstrate that the likes themselves come to be unlike or the unlikes like, that, I think, would be a marvel; but if he shows that things which partake of both of these have both properties, there seems to me nothing strange about that.

You are still young, Socrates, and philosophy has not yet taken hold of you as I think it will. Then you will not despise even the meanest things.

Do not suppose that I am turning into a kind of parricide. We shall have to put the statement of father Parmenides to the torture, and insist that what is not, in some respect has being, and conversely that what is, in a way is not.

When we speak of what is not, it seems we do not mean something contrary to what is, but only something different from it.

Since we have to distinguish the causes and definitions of coming to be and passing away alike in all cases, and in the same way, we must treat also of growth and alteration.

The elements come to be out of one another reciprocally, and each has a pair of the qualities: fire is hot and dry, air hot and moist, water cold and moist, earth cold and dry.

We must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous.

If a man had been a work of art, we should not ask what he is made of but what he is for; and the same holds of the works of nature.

Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.

The surface of any sphere is four times its greatest circle, and any cylinder having its base equal to the greatest circle of a sphere and height equal to the diameter is half as large again as the sphere.

Of the eight books, the first four form an elementary introduction. The first contains the modes of producing the three sections and the opposite branches, and their fundamental properties, worked out more fully and generally than in the writings of others.

The third book contains many remarkable theorems useful for the synthesis of solid loci, of which the most part and the most beautiful are new; and it was the discovery of these that made me aware that Euclid had not worked out the locus with respect to three and four lines.

All that has by nature with systematic method been arranged in the universe seems both in part and as a whole to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of him that created all things.

Perfect numbers are equal to the sum of their own parts: six, twenty-eight, four hundred and ninety-six, eight thousand one hundred and twenty-eight.

He began to wonder what it was that had left her, and where it had gone.

Everything that comes to be must have a cause, and the chain of causes cannot go on without end, so there must be a being whose existence is necessary.

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

In the discovery of hidden things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.

The terrella is a stone of magnetic substance ground into a sphere, and on it may be shown all the motions which the earth's own magnetic power produces in bodies placed upon it.

The square of the periodic time of any planet is to the square of the periodic time of another as the cube of its mean distance is to the cube of the other's.

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far from the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (that last infirmity of noble mind) to scorn delights, and live laborious days.

Each little region of a luminous body, such as the Sun, a candle, or a burning coal, generates its own waves of which that region is the centre.

There is the further consideration that each particle of matter in which a wave spreads ought to communicate its movement not only to the next particle in the straight line drawn from the luminous point, but also to all the others which touch it, so that around each particle there arises a wave of which that particle is the centre.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; / All Discord, Harmony not understood; / All partial Evil, universal Good: / And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT.

Political liberty is not the power of doing what we please. Liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.

Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

Beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.

Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.

And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.

You must not take it as a discourtesy if I speak plainly. I claim the privilege of speaking to juveniles as a juvenile myself.

The axioms of geometry are neither synthetic a priori judgments nor experimental facts. They are conventions. Our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts, but it remains free.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. The important applications of the science, the theoretical interest of its ideas, and the logical rigour of its methods, all generate the expectation of a speedy introduction to processes of interest.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

Every reference-body has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event.

The laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another, and light in empty space always travels at the same speed regardless of the motion of its source.

The aim of all life is death, and, looking backwards, that what was inanimate existed before what is living.

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.

The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.

I will name this the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. Why are there beings at all instead of nothing, this is manifestly the first of all questions.

Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

It was an act of desperation. For six years I had struggled with the theory of black-body radiation. I knew the problem was fundamental and I knew the answer. I had to find a theoretical explanation at any price, however high.

The text opens by warning that the Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao, announcing directly that its own central subject, the way that underlies and generates all things, exceeds ordinary language's capacity to fully capture or define it.

The text repeatedly returns to water as its central image for genuine strength, observing that water wears down even the hardest stone not through force or direct confrontation but through patient softness and constant, yielding persistence over time.

We have already discussed the first and most fundamental element, and the ordered and eternal bodies that are carried in a circle, and next to these the number and nature of the bodies that move naturally between the heavens and the region nearest the earth.

There are two kinds of exhalation, one vaporous and moist, the other dry and smoky, and the sun draws both from the earth and from moisture on its surface, the moist producing clouds and rain, the dry producing wind and, when confined below the surface, earthquakes.

There must be some one faculty to which all the objects of the several senses are made known, so that we perceive that we see and hear, and discern that sweet is different from white, not by sight or by taste alone but by some common power.

Recollection is, as it were, a kind of search, and belongs only to those creatures which are also capable of deliberation, for it is a sort of inference, one thing calling to mind another to which it is related by contiguity, similarity or contrast.

The body which moves in a circle must be without weight or lightness, for neither by nature nor contrary to nature could it move either towards or away from the center.

It is plain from what has been said that there is neither place nor void nor time outside the heaven, since it is not the nature of every body to be in a place.

Of fishes, the so-called selachians, and among them the dogfish, are seen to produce their young alive, and to nourish the embryo by means of a structure resembling, in position and function, the umbilical cord and placenta of viviparous quadrupeds.

The octopus uses its arms both as feet and as hands, drawing in food with them, and it has the remarkable habit of changing color to match the rocks near which it lives, doing this both from fear and for the purpose of concealment when hunting.

The male provides the form and the principle of movement, the female provides the body and the material; it is like the coagulation of milk, where the rennet acts on the milk to give it form.

The female is as it were a deformed male, and the menstrual discharge is semen, though not pure semen, for it lacks one thing only, the principle of soul.

Epicurus states in the Letter to Herodotus that the universe consists of bodies and void and nothing else, that bodies themselves are either compounds or the indivisible atoms from which compounds are formed, and that these atoms are infinite in number and move continuously through an infinite void.

He argues that the soul is a body made of especially fine particles distributed throughout the frame, and that it perishes along with the body's dissolution, since a soul separated from the body it was distributed through can no longer possess the sensation that constitutes its actual nature.

Let it be granted that a fluid is of such a nature that, its parts lying evenly and being continuous, that part which is thrust the least is driven along by that which is thrust the more, and that each of its parts is thrust by the fluid which is above it in a perpendicular direction, if the fluid is sunk in anything and compressed by anything else.

Any solid lighter than a fluid will, if placed in the fluid, be so far immersed that the weight of the solid will be equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

Inwood and Gerson translate and number the fragments and reports from Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Stobaeus, Sextus Empiricus and others, arranged by topic, logic, physics, ethics, reconstructing Stoic doctrine's systematic architecture from scattered secondary sources.

The collection is the standard way for students to read what the Stoics actually argued about fate, the passions, virtue and the rational cosmos, giving readers direct access to positions otherwise recoverable only through this careful scholarly reconstruction.

Cato tells Scipio and Laelius that old age is a heavy burden only for those who have nothing within themselves to rely on, while for those who look to their own resources, nothing that nature makes necessary can seem truly burdensome.

He argues that it is not by physical strength or speed that great things are achieved, but by deliberation, judgment and settled opinion, qualities old age does not diminish but actually tends to increase.

In the first Eclogue Tityrus, reclining under his beech and playing his pipe, has kept his farm by the favour of a young god at Rome, while Meliboeus drives his goats into exile, dispossessed by a veteran.

The fourth Eclogue foretells a child whose birth will bring back the golden age, when the earth will give its fruits unasked and the serpent will die, a prophecy that Christians later read as foretelling Christ.