Henry Adams Quotes

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

Playing God is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God’, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today.

I play with children so that I can learn from them.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world. ...It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play.

You can do anything with children if you only play with them.

If you work hard and play by the rules, you'll have a better life than your parents did, and your children will have a better life than you did.

Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.

In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method-more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records-of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

We want playmates we can own.

Some people become dullards, but as children we are all creative. It's in the programming, the socialization, that we lose our sense of play.

The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

And there's that one particular harbor Sheltered from the wind Where the children play on the shore each day And all are safe within...

One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things--combinations that may yield new formsof expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It's exactly what children's play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children's play is so important a part of childhood--and beyond.

Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

With my family, my sons both love music and play music, and they're really good at it.

It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying.

Jehovah is the great Miracle Maker, the unrivaled Wonder worker. None can be likened unto Him, He is alone in wonderland, the Creator and Worker of true marvels, compared with which all other remarkable things are as child's play.

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.