Quote of the Day - I love to be human

Foreword

In my past few months as a graduate student, I have read many, many papers - as all grad students do. Many have been dull, some have been entertaining and enlightening, few have inspired and energized me. In fact this might be the first one that truly made me excited. And it made me excited about nothing in particular...just excited to be able to experience the world. I read this paper and felt like I wanted to go out and paint or invent something...anything. There are two quotes from this wonderfully idealistic paper that I wanted to share. The second one is lengthy, but I feel worth the read.

1st Quote

"The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happened (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do; and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousands lives" (Bronowski, p. 25, 1977)

2nd Quote

"I have described imagination as the ability to make images to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements. This is the faculty that is specifically human, and it is the common root from which science and literature both spring and grow and flourish together. For they do flourish (and languish) together; the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts, because in them powerful minds have taken fire from one another, breathless and higgledy-piggledy, without asking too nicely whether they ought to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. Galileo and Shakespeare, who were born in the same year, grew into greatness in the same age; when Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest; and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized Version of the Bible" (Bronowski, p. 29, 1977)