Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.
Though we would strenuously deny it if charged with it, we do in fact behave as if God himself had been taken off his guard by the Fall, as if he had not quite got the situation in hand.
To be more than resigned, to embrace the Cross with joy, we must see it not as an emergency measure, but as part of the eternal rhythm of the invincible will of the Father, who ordains all things, even the most minute and insignificant, with fatherly love.
To be more than resigned, to embrace the Cross with joy, we must see it not as an emergency measure, but as part of the eternal rhythm of the invincible will of the Father, who ordains all things, even the most minute and insignificant, with fatherly love.
Book: Spiritual Childhood The Spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux
You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who keeps his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds. (Dag Hammarskjold, Past Secretary-General of the UN)
Book: The Seven Basic Habits of Highly Effective People
The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.
The deeper one enters into the study of Nature, the further one ventures into and along the by-paths that, like a mystic maze, thread Nature’s realm in every direction, the broader and grander becomes the vista opened up to the view.
Every generation thinks it has the answers and every generation is humbled by nature.
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
Book: “The Sense of Wonder” by Rachel Carson
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent.
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, if we only will tune in.
Human beings, for instance, are basically electrochemically driven membrane processes. We take in oxidant and fuel, we change the form of it, things move through membranes, and we oxygenate our blood - that’s how nature works. Most industry is built on brute force: you start a process by increasing pressure or temperature. Nature changes free energy states much more gently, and, as a result, much more efficiently. So the next century is going to see a shift toward electrochemical processes and away from temperature and pressure systems.
Realize that no matter how wonderful a situation may be, its nature is such that it must end.
The ignorant man marvels at the exceptional; the wise man marvels at the common; the greatest wonder of all is the regularity of nature.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
from a letter Einstein wrote on March 24, 1954
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books—a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint. How many apples fell on Newton’s head before he took the hint. Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly, we take the hint.