Lapidarium

Amira's favorite quotes

"Everything you can imagine is real."— Pablo Picasso

Homepage
Lapidarium notes
Pensieri a caso
A Box Of Stories

Tags:

Ancient
Age of information
Anthropology
Art
Artificial intelligence
Astronomy
Atheism
Beauty
Biography
Books
Buddism
China
Christianity
Civilization
Cognition, relativity
Cognitive science
Collective intelligence
Communication
Consciousness
Creativity
Culture
Curiosity
Cyberspace
Definitions
Democracy
Documentary
Drawing
Earth
Economy
Evolution
Friendship
Funny
Genetics
Globalization
Greek & Latin
Happiness
History
Human being
Illustrations
Imagination
Individualism
Information
Inspiration
Internet
Knowledge
Language
Learning
Life
Literature
Logic
Love
Mathematics
Media
Metaphor
Mind & Brain
Morality
Multiculturalism
Music
Networks
Neuroscience
Painting
Paradoxes
Patterns
Philosophy
Poetry
Politics
Physics
Psychology
Rationalism
Reading
Religions
Science
Science & Art
Self improvement
Semantics
Singularity
Society
Sociology
Storytelling
Technology
The other
Time
Traveling
USA
Unconsciousness
Universe
Writing
Video
Violence
Visualization

Twitter

Facebook

Contact

Archive

Mar
8th

Thu

“Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.”

— Ronald Wright, Canadian writer, historian, archeologist, A Short History of Progress, House of Anansi Press, 2004. (Illustration: The Colossus of Rhodes)

Dec
30th

Fri

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.

Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.”

— Stephen Greenblatt, literary critic, theorist and scholar, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Aug
28th

Sat

“There are some, King Gelon, who think that the number of the sands is infinite in multitude; and I mean by sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited. Again there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its multitude. And it is clear that they who hold this view, if they imagined a mass made up of sand in other respects as large as the mass of the earth, including in it all the seas and the hollows of the earth filled up to the height equal to that of the highest mountains, would be many times further still from recognizing that any number could be expressed which exceeded the multitude of the sand so taken. But I will try to show you, by means of geometrical proofs which you will be able to follow, that, of the numbers named by me and given in the work which I sent to Zeuxippus, some exceed not only the number of the mass of sand equal in size to the earth filled up in the way described, but also that of a mass equal in size to the universe.”

— Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner

Jun
15th

Tue

“Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it’s probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos.

Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn’t they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here?

I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”

— Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 13: Who Speaks for Earth? (28m 30s), 1990.