This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have su...ited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From man or angel the great Architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge... His secrets to be scanned by them who ought Rather admire; or if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the heav'ns Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model heav'n And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances, how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,--'tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,--I should blush ... as an author; ...inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,--I would tear it out of my book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally i...mportant task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of f...act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, ...that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the "personal experience" of science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion ... you have no calling for science and you should do something else. For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »