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"What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
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"It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature."

"The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground."

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

"What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth."

"Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think."

"I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way."

"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."

"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

"A pier is a disappointed bridge, yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel."

"Pride makes us long for a solution to things " a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear."

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."

"Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn t all it s cracked up to be."

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."

"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."
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