As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’ And I always used to think, ‘So?
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.
There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.
Nothing – really, absolutely nothing – says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century’s most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren’t available.
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit…
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.
The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.
The romance of travel wasn’t always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn’t subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally.
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: “I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the ‘Chinese Resaturant Problem’–because we has a dim sun.
Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity
If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.
Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don’t often see a scientist do: he shivered.
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn’t wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.
They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.
Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.
You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life.
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.
I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.
The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.
Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, “We all do.
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
She would only make me take my seat if I didn’t act calm and Swiss about it all.
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows… We’re reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa – just kind of open space.
You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.