Shapley Quotes & Sayings

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much — Oscar Wilde

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'. — Harlow Shapley

Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She'd swallow everything - her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there'd be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made. — Marie Rutkoski

Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large. — Marcia Bartusiak

What if thought is not free? What if memory is a prison, society a lie? Sometimes I look around and all I hear is screaming, screaming, screaming - what if you are the enlightened one? — Claire North

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike. — Jeremy Seabrook

Take a close look at nature and you'll see that every living creature is wired for mutation and variation. The fact that people can say, "I'm not the same person I used to be," is the greatest of all miracles. — Toni Sorenson

WORDS
I carry a message
that i cannot read.
The words may be haunting
or tender or sweet.
Thought what it says
I do not know,
I still carry it with me,
wherever i go. — Carolee Dean

Her hair came undone and rose off her shoulders, quivering as if from a breeze. Static kept snapping through the strands, and Jasmira's eyes turned completely white. Her arms were covered in spiraled script. It crawled and twisted on her skin. The text shone burgundy. Single letters kept separating and slowly flaking off. They resembled tiny red fire sparks, burning brightly, and then disappearing all together. — A.O. Peart

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming. — Jim Crace

In a sense Shapley's telling me that space was transparent, which I shouldn't have believed, illustrates a fundamental problem in science, believing what people tell you. Go and find it out for yourself. That same error has persisted in my life and in many other people's. Authorities are not always authorities on everything; they often cling to their own mistakes. — Jesse L. Greenstein

The soul is both fragile and resilient...The artisan soul must be both tender and tough. — Erwin Raphael McManus

The solar system is off center and consequently man is too ... — Harlow Shapley

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade. — Harlow Shapley

There is no debate among any statured scientists of what is happening. The only debate is the rate at which it is happening. — James McCarthy

Bleesed is the person whose mind is ever at peace never diprssed never disappointed. — Kishore Bansal

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate. — Halton Arp

No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it. — Harlow Shapley

Giving free advice is a sad waste of effort. In the first place, no man will act upon it unless he is already inclined to do so. Secondly, when a man lays his case before you, the idea that he is asking your advice is a polite fabrication. He merely is suggesting that he is doing so, while as a fact his real object is to acquaint you with his personal activity. He wants to talk to somebody, being a natural gossip or gadder, and he plays upon your propensity for "giving advice" in order to get an audience. — William H. McMaster

The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units. [Stating his conviction on the nature of nebulae during the Shapley-Curtis debate on 26 Apr 1920 to the National Academy of Sciences.] — Heber Doust Curtis

A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did that work. — Harlow Shapley

It seems to me that the evidence ... is opposed to the view that the spirals are individual galaxies comparable with our own. In fact, there appears as yet no reason for modifying the tentative hypothesis that the spirals are not composed of typical stars at all, but are truly nebulous objects. — Harlow Shapley

If I hear, 'Be afraid of Tehran,' I'm like, 'I'd better go to Tehran.' — Henry Rollins