Jonathan Swift Quotes

The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

Jonathan Swift

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Quotes to Explore

• Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.

  

  Albert Einstein
  • Children
  • Poverty
  • Philosophy

• The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have a mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood, for an insight into the rest.

  

  Samuel Horsley
  • May
  • Rest
  • Connection

• The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them - capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.

  

  John Locke Nazareth
  • Business
  • Education
  • Sciences

• Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

  

  Francis Bacon
  • Chance
  • Directions
  • Sciences

• Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?

  

  Diogenes
  • Path
  • Existence
  • Backward

• To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

  

  Will Yun Lee
  • Sciences
  • Attempt
  • Standpoint

• The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal.

  

  Martin Luther
  • Life
  • Philosophers
  • Sciences

• Astrology, the noblest of sciences.

  

  Dante Alighieri
  • Sciences
  • Astrology
  • Noblest

• This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

  

  Thomas Carlyle
  • Thinking
  • Miracle
  • Sciences

• But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better.

  

  Etienne Bonnot de Condillac
  • Attention
  • Language
  • Progress

• Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.

  

  Reid Hoffman
  • Moving
  • Busy
  • Forward

• Logic is not only an exact science, but is the most simple and elementary of all sciences; it ought therefore undoubtedly to find some place in every course of education.

  

  William Stanley Jevons
  • Simple
  • Logic
  • Courses

• If the world were really right, humans would live life backward and do the first part last. They'd be all knowing in the beginning and innocent in the end.

  

  Angela Johnson
  • Life
  • World
  • Knowing

• Those that study particular sciences, and neglect philosophy, are like Penelope's wooers, that make love to the waiting women.

  

  Aristippus
  • Study
  • Philosophy
  • Sciences

• Robinson could deliver a knockout blow going backward.

  

  Bert Sugar
  • Deliver
  • Backward
  • Knockouts

• Ultimately, the main reason that you want more women in the sciences is the same reason you want more gay men in the sciences. It's the same reason you want more Latinos or African Americans; it's because if you come at a problem from a different perspective, you will be offering a creative vision that wasn't there before.

  

  Cara Santa Maria
  • Different
  • Women
  • Reason

• That part of a work of one author found in another is not of itself piracy, or sufficient to support an action; a man may adopt part of the work of another; he may so make use of another’s labors for the promotion of science and the benefit of the public.

  

  Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough
  • Teamwork
  • Sciences
  • Sharing

• The task of physiological psychology remains the same in the analysis of ideas that it was in the investigation of sensations: to act as mediator between the neighbouring sciences of physiology and psychology.

  

  Wilhelm Wundt
  • Psychology
  • Remains
  • Analysis

• Many think of the sciences as merely a fund of knowledge. Journalists never ask scientists anything other than what the applications are of scientific breakthroughs. Interestingly, I doubt they ever ask a musician, writer, or actor the same question. I wonder why.

  

  Harry Kroto
  • Knowledge
  • Scientists
  • Sciences

• I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

  

  Pat Conroy
  • Life
  • Nature
  • Human Nature

• The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

  

  Flannery O'Connor
  • Up
  • She
  • Hope

• For every discouragement has been allowed to come to us in order that through it we may be cast in utter helplessness at the Saviour's feet.

  

  Alan Redpath
  • Saviour
  • Discouragement
  • Helplessness

• Everything necessary to the full and complete expression of the most boundless experience of joy is mine now.

  

  Ernest Holmes
  • Experience
  • Joy
  • Expression

• The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

  

  Jonathan Swift
  • Sciences
  • Backward
  • Stockings