Reads tagged with “public domain”

Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence
“We are ourselves creating our own successors… We are daily giving them… that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”

A Chaos of Delight: Darwin on the Sublimity and Transcendence of Nature
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

How to Bear Your Suffering: The Young Poet Anne Reeve Aldrich’s Extraordinary Letter to Emily Dickinson
“It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”

The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on the Art of Noticing and What Artists Can Learn from Naturalists
“We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features.”

Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death: How the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics
“There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have no physical properties which are in any way different.”

Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes
“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.”

The Milky Way, the Pond, and the Meaning of Life: Thoreau on Solitude, Sympathy, and the Salve for Melancholy
“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”

Anne Pratt’s Flowers, Ferns, Quiet Ferocity: How a Middle-Aged Victorian Woman Became One of the Great Masters of Scientific Illustration
“The beauty of a flower… may serve to awaken an interest in nature, which shall not sleep again.”

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