Richard Holmes > Quotes

“There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.”
― Richard Holmes

“Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“He (the British soldier) is generally beloved by two sorts of Companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers of a Scarlet Coat.”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“One of the wilder proselytizers, a Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that ‘The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its sense.’ To which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair gave the legendary reply, ‘Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad.”
― Richard Holmes

“Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“People today do not know the difference between a bombardier and a brigadier”
― Richard Holmes, Soldiers: A History Of Men In Battle

“The cool feats of our scientific men are known to us all – such as that of Sir Humphry Davy inhaling a particular gas with an accurate report every minute or two of its successive effects upon his brain and sense.”
― Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

“Most people today couldn't tell a bombardier from a brigadier" - said during a lecture in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund in 2009”
― Richard Holmes, Soldiers: A History Of Men In Battle

“Finally, Herschel completely perplexed the poet by remarking that many distant stars had probably 'ceased to exist' millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts. 'The light did travel after the body was gone.' After leaving Herschel, Campbell walked onto the shingle of Brighton beach, gazing out to sea, feeling 'elevated and overcome.' He was reminded of Newton's observation that he was just a child picking up shells on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay before him.”
― Richard Holmes

“In October 1864 the Scottish literary magazine Blackwood’s published a satirical article on superfluous Victorian hobbies, especially extreme sports and the fashion for futile risk-taking. It was particularly fierce on the desire to rise above one’s station.”
― Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

“Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’90”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.”
― Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit

“Every invention, every innovation in the history of the world, has been laughed at. Columbus was renounced as a faker; Morse was called a crank; Franklin a fool; Charles Darwin ridiculed for years. It seems to be the fate of every man or woman who discovers a new fact, to be made the subject of attacks of the most violent nature, without rhyme or reason.”
― Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

“Banks was twenty-six years old, tall and well-built, with an appealing bramble of dark curls. By temperament he was cheerful, confident and adventurous: a true child of the Enlightenment. Yet he had thoughtful eyes and, at moments, a certain brooding intensity: a premonition of a quite different sensibility, the dreaming inwardness of Romanticism. He did not like to give way to it. So he kept good company with his shipmates, and had carefully maintained his physical fitness throughout the first eight months of the voyage. He regarded himself — ‘thank god’ — as in as good mental and physical trim as a man could be. When occasionally depressed, he did vigorous jumping ‘rope exercises’ in his cabin, once nearly breaking his leg while skipping.1”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“in March 1769, concluding: ‘It is however some pleasure to be able to disprove that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers, of which sort most are who have wrote any thing about these seas without having themselves been in them. They”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Glaisher emphasised the particular scientific virtues required by ballooning: meticulous care and accuracy, calmness and detachment, stoic self-discipline; and a kind of spiritual openness to the wonders of Creation.”
― Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

“Highlands of Scotland:”
― Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

“My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! …5”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

“Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of
science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are
complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer. HUMPHRY DAVY,”
― Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science