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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index D > Category: Despair

Despair Quotes (9 quotes)

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this—that men despair and think things impossible.
— Sir Francis Bacon
Translation of Novum Organum, CIX. In Francis Bacon, James Spedding, The Works of Francis Bacon (1864), Vol. 8, 140-141.
Science quotes on:  |  Impossible (21)  |  Obstacle (8)  |  Progress Of Science (2)  |  Task (24)  |  Thinking (140)  |  Undertake (3)

Despair is better treated with hope, not dope.
— Richard Alan John Asher
Lancet (1958), 1, 954.
Science quotes on:  |  Drug (30)  |  Hope (33)

If I had my life to live over again I would not devote it to develop new industrial processes: I would try to add my humble efforts to use Science to the betterment of the human race.
I despair of the helter-skelter methods of our vaulted homo sapiens, misguided by his ignorance and his politicians. If we continue our ways, there is every possibility that the human race may follow the road of former living races of animals whose fossils proclaim that they were not fit to continue. Religion, laws and morals is not enough. We need more. Science can help us.
— Leo Hendrik Baekeland
Letter to a friend (14 Jan 1934). In Savage Grace (1985, 2007), 62.
Science quotes on:  |  Devotion (10)  |  Effort (28)  |  Extinction (35)  |  Fossil (69)  |  Help (10)  |  Homo Sapiens (11)  |  Human Race (27)  |  Humility (10)  |  Ignorance (94)  |  Industry (42)  |  Law (243)  |  Life (379)  |  Method (63)  |  Need (32)  |  Politician (12)  |  Process (79)  |  Religion (101)  |  Science (754)

Physical misery is great everywhere out here [Africa]. Are we justified in shutting our eyes and ignoring it because our European newspapers tell us nothing about it? We civilised people have been spoilt. If any one of us is ill the doctor comes at once. Is an operation necessary, the door of some hospital or other opens to us immediately. But let every one reflect on the meaning of the fact that out here millions and millions live without help or hope of it. Every day thousands and thousands endure the most terrible sufferings, though medical science could avert them. Every day there prevails in many and many a far-off hut a despair which we could banish. Will each of my readers think what the last ten years of his family history would have been if they had been passed without medical or surgical help of any sort? It is time that we should wake from slumber and face our responsibilities!
— Albert Schweitzer
In On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, trans. C. T. Campion (1948, 1998), 126-127.
Science quotes on:  |  Africa (5)  |  Awakening (3)  |  Civilization (77)  |  Doctor (49)  |  Europe (14)  |  Hospital (21)  |  Illness (9)  |  Justification (16)  |  Medical Science (3)  |  Medicine (183)  |  Million (20)  |  Misery (8)  |  Newspaper (14)  |  Operation (47)  |  Responsibility (21)  |  Slumber (2)  |  Suffering (17)  |  Surgery (27)

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.
— Thomas Hunt Morgan
The Physical Basis of Heredity (1919), 15.
Science quotes on:  |  Biology (73)  |  Complication (12)  |  Exact (10)  |  Heredity (38)  |  Ignorance (94)  |  Illusion (12)  |  Inscrutability (2)  |  Simplicity (81)

The history of mathematics, as of any science, is to some extent the story of the continual replacement of one set of misconceptions by another. This is of course no cause for despair, for the newly instated assumptions very often possess the merit of being closer approximations to truth than those that they replace.
— Frank C. DeSua
In 'Consistency and Completeness—A Résumé', The American Mathematical Monthly (May 1956), 63, No.5, 295.
Science quotes on:  |  Approximation (9)  |  Assumption (23)  |  Closer (2)  |  Continual (2)  |  History Of Science (27)  |  Merit (14)  |  Misconception (2)  |  Replacement (5)  |  Scientific Method (88)  |  Set (9)  |  Story (15)  |  Truth (399)

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
— John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
English Journey (1934), 123.
Science quotes on:  |  Battle (8)  |  Development (97)  |  Fear (47)  |  History (135)  |  Hope (33)  |  Manufacturing (13)  |  Novel (5)  |  Pioneer (4)  |  Romance (5)  |  Triumph (17)  |  Typewriter (6)

We have learned that there is an endocrinology of elation and despair, a chemistry of mystical insight, and, in relation to the autonomic nervous system, a meteorology and even... an astro-physics of changing moods.
— Aldous (Leonard) Huxley
Literature and Science (1963), 90.
Science quotes on:  |  Astrophysics (9)  |  Chemistry (133)  |  Insight (20)  |  Joy (23)  |  Meteorology (15)  |  Mood (3)  |  Mystery (64)  |  Nerve (50)

[Magic] enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.
— Bronislaw Malinowski
Magic, Science and Religion (1925), 90.
Science quotes on:  |  Anger (8)  |  Anxiety (5)  |  Confidence (12)  |  Doubt (56)  |  Enable (5)  |  Faith (56)  |  Fear (47)  |  Function (34)  |  Hate (8)  |  Hope (33)  |  Importance (85)  |  Integrity (4)  |  Love (57)  |  Magic (20)  |  Mind (236)  |  Optimism (4)  |  Pessimism (3)  |  Ritual (4)  |  Steadfastness (2)  |  Task (24)  |  Value (50)  |  Victory (7)



Carl Sagan Thumbnail At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

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