Stanley Szelagowski > Stanley's Quotes

“The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.”
― Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley

“[Responding to the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce's question whether he traced his descent from an ape on his mother's or his father's side]

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who … plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”
― Thomas Huxley

“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn”
― Rimbaud

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Love...no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“I is another.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”
― Theodore Adorno