#sea

Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes. ↗

— Adam A. Watt

#gnothi-seauton #know-thyself #knowledge #proust #art

They sat on the outcropping of stone and at bread and fruit. Kasta watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, struck it in one place than another. It rose and fell again. It flowed, like water. "Is this what the sea is like?" Kasta asked, and they both turned to her, surprised. "Does the sea move the way this grass moves?" “It's like the sea,” she said. Giddon’s eyes on her were incredulous. “What? Is it such a strange thing to say?” “It’s a strange thing for you to say.” He shook his head. He gathered their bread and fruit, then rose. “The Lienid fighter is filling your mind with romantic notions. ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#romantic

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#science #search-for-meaning #science

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#science #science

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile. ↗

— Hans Selye

#science #science

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ↗

— Albert Camus

#strength #trial #triumph #strength

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there. ↗

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#searching #travel #travel

What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#searching #seeking #dance

We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us. ↗

— Daniel Abraham

#death #renewal #seasons #death