Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Hold on to the ancient Way to master the present, and to learn the distant beginning.

I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

The great wisdom of the world comes from the very old.

I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing for prescientific people.

It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.

Greeks are notorious for their potions. I wouldn't say I've used Windex, but there are so many tricks that have been handed down to me.

We help immigrants because we are an immigrant nation, and we are an immigrant church. We've always done that; this is nothing new to us. This is not a new venture for us. It's who we are and have been from the very beginning of the history of the Catholic Church in this country.

It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. It asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times. This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself.

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.

You are challenged to avoid mediocrity, acquire knowledge from the sages of antiquity, the achievements of the scientific present, and the prophets of the living God. Isaiah once spoke as follows, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun

Don’t be surprised. There is nothing new under the sun. Only endless repackagings

All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

All science is transcendental or else passes away.

The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

To avoid a future of war, crime, and bankruptcy, the individual must begin to plan his own destiny, and the best source for the necessary information comes down to us through the writings of the ancients. The greatest knowledge of all time should be available ... in a book that would be a monument, not merely a coffin.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.

The correct meaning of the statement The Vedas are beginningless and eternal is that the law or truth revealed by them is permanent and changeless.

All wisdom is not new wisdom.

There are some things that are as ancient as time, and knowing when a man desires you is one of those.