Mark Twain Quotes

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet.

It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. What it does is it helps to address really fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, by which I mean we can learn how life came about.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

A few years in the age of nations is nothing.

Imagine thousands and thousands of years ago, when the human race was born in Africa, if we'd not allowed them to get out of Africa then we wouldn't exist.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

We've more important studies than your fantasies and fears You know that rock's been perched up there for a hundred thousand years.

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous.

Capitalism, in contrast, has existed for fewer than 300 years. If the entire history of Homo sapiens was a 24-hour day, then capitalism has existed for two minutes.

You are the result of billions of years of evolution. You will only live for a few years and will never exist again. Absolutely beautiful

Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

We foolish mortals sometimes live through years not realizing how short life is, and that TODAY is your life.

I believe that when you stop renewing and are no longer open to change and the possibilities that continually unfold, you stop being alive and are just getting through the years. Transformation doesn't happen unless you're willing: It's your choice.

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it’s sinking.

No, My son, the evolutionists are not right. I created all of this-all of this-in the blink of an eye; in one holy instant-just as the creationists have said. And...it came about through a process of evolution taking billions and billions of what you call years, just as the evolutionists claim. They are both "right." As the cosmonauts discovered, it all depends on how you look at it.

Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.