Hooke Quotes & Sayings

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- From a letter to Robert Hooke dated February 5th, 1676.
The metaphor was first recorded in 1159 by John of Salisbury and attributed to Bernard of Chartres:
Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea. — Isaac Newton

When you're used to having nothing, nothing becomes your everything, and you never really want for anything. But it's a double-edged sword, because there's the danger of becoming complacent, becoming too happy with that nothing, because you've never known anything better. Complacency is the death of dreams, and freedom. — Isaac Hooke

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon. — Robert Hooke

Make better coffee and you make a whole bunch of people a whole lot happier. — Isaac Hooke

The truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things. — Robert Hooke

If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly such Vegetables or Animals. These are truly Authentick Antiquity not to be counterfeited, the Stamps, and Impressions, and Characters of Nature that are beyond the Reach and Power of Humane Wit and Invention, and are true universal Characters legible to all rational Men. — Robert Hooke

Nature ... is, as it were, a continual circulation. Water is rais'd in Vapour into the Air by one Quality and precipitated down in drops by another, the Rivers run into the Sea, and the Sea again supplies them. — Robert Hooke

There is scarce any one invention, which this nation has produced in our age, but it has some way or other been set forward by his assistance ... He is indeed a man born for the good of mankind, and for the honour of his country ... So I may thank God, that Dr. Wilkins was an Englishman, for wherever he had lived, there had been the chief seat of generous knowledge and true philosophy. — Robert Hooke

Thinking is what angels do - it is a property given to Man by God." "How do you suppose God gives it to us?" "I do not pretend to know, sir!" "If you take a man's brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence - the divine presence of God on Earth?" "That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists." "Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man's brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?" Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes. — Neal Stephenson

Not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysicks, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick. — Robert Hooke

The bookworm - "one of the teeth of time," as Hooke put it - is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. — Stephen Greenblatt

The footsteps of Nature are to be trac'd, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in endeavouring to avoid our discovery. — Robert Hooke

Most of these Mountains and Inland places whereon these kind of Petrify'd Bodies and Shells are found at present, or have been heretofore, were formerly under the Water, and that either by the descending of the Waters to another part of the Earth by the alteration of the Centre of Gravity of the whole bulk, or rather by the Eruption of some kind of Subterraneous Fires or Earthquakes, great quantities of Earth have been deserted by the Water and laid bare and dry. — Robert Hooke

Newton advanced, with one gigantic stride, from the regions of twilight into the noon day of science. A Boyle and a Hooke, who would otherwise have been deservedly the boast of their century, served but as obscure forerunners of Newton's glories. — Thomas Young

Mr Hooke sent, in his next letter [to Sir Isaac Newton] the whole of his Hypothesis, scil that the gravitation was reciprocall to the square of the distance: ... This is the greatest Discovery in Nature that ever was since the World's Creation. It was never so much as hinted by any man before. I wish he had writt plainer, and afforded a little more paper. — John Aubrey

The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). — Robert Hooke

There were worse fates. He was doing what he was born to do. Fighting on the side of good against radicals who sought to destroy the world. This was the good fight. The best fight. — Isaac Hooke

The great put the little on the hooke. — George Herbert

The "gravity train" was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century. — Stephen Baxter

The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. — Isaac Hooke

You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real. — Isaac Hooke

By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding. — Robert Hooke

He rode death's horse by the tips of his fingers and the tips of his toes. — Isaac Hooke

[Newton wrote to Halley ... that he would not give Hooke any credit] That, alas, is vanity. You find it in so many scientists. You know, it has always hurt me to think that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler. — Albert Einstein

Before I went to bed, I sat up till 2 a-clock in my chamber, reading of Mr. Hooke's Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life. — Samuel Pepys