James Lovelock Quotes

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'

The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.

The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge.

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.

i can't understand her" well son, you might as well try to understand the sun". derived form the book:fires of heaven by robert jordan.

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.

Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.

The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

It's an America with strange mythic depths. I see it as a distorting mirror; a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic. It's about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all.

Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.

There is none so blind as he who will not see. We must not close our minds, we must let our thoughts be free. For every hour that passes by, we know the world gets a little bit older, it's time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come?

I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me- holds my mind in mortmain. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe- like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass.

I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature.

Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.

I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.