Simon Newcomb Quotes

I just want pieces of the world.

People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.

He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

I don't know what's on the other side.

We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

When the whistle blew and the call stretched thin across the night, one had to believe that any journey could be sweet to the soul.

Space is as infinite as we can imagine, and expanding this perspective is what adjusts humankind focus on conquering our true enemies, the formidable foes: ignorance and limitation.

The heart has a yearning for the unknown, a longing to penetrate the deep shadow and the winding glade, where, as it seems, no human foot has been.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me.

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.