Erwin Chargaff > Quotes

“Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.”
― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

“Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question “how?” but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question “why?”
― Erwin Chargaff

“If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.”
― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

“Scientific fashions last longer than women's fashions but not as long as men's”
― Erwin Chargaff, Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science

“It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light.”
― Erwin Chargaff

“There exist mysterious links between language and the human brain; and the heartless and brutal way in which language is used in our times, as if it were only a power tool in public relations, a shortcut from sly producer to gullible consumer, has always seemed to me the most threatening portent of incipient bestialization. It is frightening to observe that a progressive aphasia, not organically determined, appears to overtake large numbers of people who seem to be unable to express themselves except by hoarse barks and expletives. The gift of tongues, not explainable on the basis of natural selection, is the true attribute of humanization; and it is only fitting that it be revoked shortly before the tails begin to grow.”
― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

“The stress on mechanisms has given rise to one of the curses of our time: the expert. It has made body mechanics out of physicians and cell mechanics out of biologists; and if the philosopher cannot yet be called a brain mechanic, this is only a sign of his backwardness.”
― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

“If Herostratos has earned immortality for having burned down the temple of Artemis in Ephesos, maybe the man from whom he got the matches ought not to be entirely forgotten.”
― Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature