It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been b...rought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Y'know scientists are funny. We probe and measure and dissect. Invent lights without heat, weigh a caterpillar's eyebrow. But when... it comes to really important things we're as stupid as the caveman.... Like love. Makes the world go 'round, but what do we know about it? Is it a fact? Is it chemistry? Electricity?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all aware that speech, like chemistry, has a structure. There is a limited set of elements--vowels and consonants--and thes...e are combined to produce words which, in turn, compound into sentences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You are done for--a living dead man--not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides ...the "mystery" of life. Not for nothing is hatred still the best tonic ever discovered, for which any organism, however feeble, has a tolerance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains f...rom any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents con...tinuous hard labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed to Nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outv...alues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence o...f heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »