Francis Collins Quotes

It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

It's hard to tell / if we close our eyes or if night / opens in us other starred eyes, / if it burrows into the wall of our dream / till some other door opens. / But the dream is only the flitting costume of one moment, / is spent in one beat / of the darkness, / and falls at our feet, cast off / as the day stirs and sails away with us.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

Show me the path I must walk and do not let me stumble in the dark places that lie ahead.

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

...and the night is so deep and dark that I wonder if the sun will ever come up.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Is all our Life, then but a dream Seen faintly in the golden gleam Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

All growth is a leap in the dark.

Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God.

You like being vague, don't you? (Amanda) It was a choice of being a Dark-Hunter or a prophet. Personally I like the slash-and-kill stuff much more than prayers and the lotus position. (Acheron)

All I know is a door into the dark

Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.