Quotes & Sayings About Microscopic Things

Alan Rocke's Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule's daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation. — Roald Hoffmann

But living creatures are idiosyncratic. They are created in such a way that they can actualize only what their microscopic minds wish for. The concept of limitless is bound heavily by the minor actualization of what perfection is ... — Lionel Suggs

The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through, and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you. — Paul Auster

The microscopic world became my obsession. — Willard Wigan

Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk. — Joseph Roth

The cause of the Party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife anew sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voices is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked ... — Arthur Koestler

Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level. — Ravi Gomatam

He had three
incision sites: one where the microscopic camera had gone in and
two where they'd done the actual work, and the abuse he'd taken
today went straight to her heart. "Oh, Pace."
"I'm guessing that wasn't an 'Oh, Pace, you're so sexy, take me.' — Jill Shalvis

What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret? — Jane Roberts

My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers, but sex is like a snake, it slithers through everything. — Ernesto Neto

One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that - well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but - well - some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope'
'No,' she said smiling, 'no.'
'It would have made all the difference,' said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. — Vladimir Nabokov

I just like the insides of things and finding ways into microscopic worlds. There's also an element of control, taking things apart and putting them back together. It's a very tedious task. You can be alone and create a world for yourself. — Mackenzie Davis

How can our leaders be so hypersensitive to the most microscopic of perceived anti-Jewish slurs, yet so entirely indifferent to flagrant and vicious anti-Christian insults? — Daniel Lapin

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. — Arthur C. Clarke

The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, "sees" things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different. — Rudolf Arnheim

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be. — Henri Frederic Amiel

Asia and Europe: tiny corners of the Cosmos. Every sea: a mere drop. Mount Athos: a lump of dirt. The present moment is the smallest point in all eternity. All is microscopic, changeable, disappearing. All things come from that faraway place, either originating directly from that governing part which is common to all, or else following from it as consequences. So even the gaping jaws of the lion, deadly poison, and all harmful things like thorns or an oozing bog are products of that awesome and noble source. Do not imagine these things to be alien to that which you revere, but turn your Reason to the source of all things. — Marcus Aurelius

stromatolites - a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things. — Bill Bryson

The study of Nature brings into a harmonious whole the questions of the Infinite, the Historic, and the Microscopic as part of the Great Creator's work. — Robert Baden-Powell

I found it again at last! Page 156 - 157 of *My Soul to Keep* by Melanie Wells.

Dr. Dylan Foster is thinking to herself while searching through literature on snake lore, "Then there was all the mystical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busing in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew--in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew--all notable skills--but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory."

"When it was all said and done, I'd spent four years and trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me. — Melanie Wells

Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. — William Ernest Henley

Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n. — Alexander Pope

The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That's the subject known as "statistical mechanics." But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That's the phenomenological approach we've been discussing, known as "thermodynamics." It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature. — Sean Carroll

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude. — Jean Baudrillard

How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes. — Justin Halpern

Rayanne: I think part of him is partly interested in you. Definitely. I mean, he's got other things on his mind.
Angela: But that's the part that's so unfair. I have nothing else on my mind. How comes I have to be the one sitting around analyzing him in like microscopic detail, and he gets to be the one with other things on his mind.
Rickie: That is deep. — David Levithan

No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid. — Louis Pasteur

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting. — Marshall McLuhan

Millions of microscopic fragments of Julia now lay, invisibly, on the speckled beige linoleum tiles of the classroom floor. What was left in her chair was a phantom of Julia, which she learned to project at these moments, by sheer force of will, until she could resemble herself, a process that would take days, even weeks, and was never entirely successful. — Suzanne Berne

Jacques La Borwitz had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone." -Cecelia Brady — F Scott Fitzgerald

All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint. — David Eagleman

When it comes to such open-heart reflection, I'm a firm believer in the observer effect, which states that anything you try to observe is automatically changed by the mere fact that you're looking at it. The way I see it, if you try to study your emotions on a microscopic level, the best you can do is understand how it feels to hold the magnifying glass. — Neal Shusterman

When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness. — Eugene Wigner

At the microscopic level, the protein cubes were solid food particles suspended in thick vegetable oil. The food particles compressed to less than half their original size, but the oil was barely affected at all. This changed the volume ratio of solid to liquid dramatically, which in turn made the aggregate act as a liquid. Known as "liquefaction," this process transformed the protein cubes from a steady solid into a flowing sludge. — Andy Weir

God cannot be found on a microscopic slide, but in the hearts of men. — Edgar Magnin

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley. — H.P. Lovecraft

Like the microscopic strands of DNA that predetermine the identity of a macroscopic species and the unique propertires of its members, the modern look and feel of the cosmos was writ in the fabric of its earliest moments, and carried relentlessly through time and space. We feel it when we look up. We feel it when we look down. We feel it when we look within. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

But that's the part that's so unfair. I have nothing else on my mind. How come I have to be the one sitting around analyzing him in like microscopic detail, and he gets to be the one with other things on his mind? — David Levithan

So if we're all quarks and electrons ... " he begins.
What?"
We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."
Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time. — Scarlett Thomas

One last word," I said in my horrible English, "are you quite, quite sure that
well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow , but
well
some day, any day, you will not come live with me? I will create a new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope."
"No," she said smiling, "no."
"It would have made all the difference," said Humbert Humbert. — Vladimir Nabokov

Mr. Eissen, the man in the wonderful suit, tapped one fingertip on the table. He did it very quietly, but everyone got silent and sat up a little straighter. Eissen gave me a microscopic smile. "Robert," he said, emphasizing the name slightly, and then adding, "Robert Chase." He gave a slight, dismissive shake of his head. "Robert is a well-known actor, Mr. Morgan. — Jeff Lindsay

I sincerely hoped I'd beaten the bedding enough that any unwelcome guests of the microscopic variety had gotten the word their invitation was revoked. Pancho — April White

How, in good conscience," Alessandro asked, "can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches?" "Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches." "Everyone doesn't have the privilege. You do because you're a field marshal in command of a microscopic unit." "I realize that," Strassnitzky answered, "and, given such a rare opportunity, of which most men cannot even dream, I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to seize it, would I not? I exploit it to the full. — Mark Helprin

Art that's blind to the true landscape we inhabit - physical reality in the widest sense - is just absurdly, pathetically blinkered and myopic.
So while I'm sure that the individual works I've written have only succeeded to varying degrees, I'm still proud to have done something to nudge the center of gravity of contemporary SF some microscopic distance towards a genuine engagement with reality." -Greg Egan — Karen Burnham

Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. — John B. S. Haldane

The ladies looked one another over with microscopic carelessness. — Arthur Baer

Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians. And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population. But oh, how they try. — Dick Cavett