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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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"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
"The disruption of science is one which abandons the method and seeks to conquer grounds outside its territory. It is not at all religion but this pseudo-science that is the enemy of science."
"Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture."
"Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake."
"Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
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