Stephen Jay Gould vs. Thomas Carlyle
Read 20 entries attributed to Stephen Jay Gould alongside 20 attributed to Thomas Carlyle. Compare the wording and topic labels.
This page places 20 entries attributed to Stephen Jay Gould alongside 20 attributed to Thomas Carlyle. Each selection is ordered by stored importance score. These are selections from QuoteLineage, not complete accounts of either author's work.
Topic labels present in both displayed selections: life, justice, books, knowledge, truth. Shared labels do not by themselves demonstrate agreement, disagreement, or influence between the authors.
Attributed to Stephen Jay Gould, entry #147777: "All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipate…"
Attributed to Thomas Carlyle, entry #111361: "Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself."
Side-by-Side Comparison
Stephen Jay Gould
1941 – 2002
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
"All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. Bu…"
#nature"If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would sur…"
#creativity"The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic d…"
#life"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearm…"
#philosophy"Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck…"
#philosophy"I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary t…"
#nature"In his anti-Darwinian book... , Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanat…"
#justice"Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even explicitly gives us pe…"
#books"f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only …"
#philosophy"Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search f…"
#knowledge"The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in st…"
#death"The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. Th…"
#life"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually tur…"
#art"I have long recognized the theory and aesthetic of such comprehensive display: show everything and incite wonder by sheer variety. But I had never realized h…"
#science"The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive"
#history"In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms …"
#philosophy"We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for …"
#humor"The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environme…"
#history"great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for pene…"
#science"But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measur…"
#truthThomas Carlyle
1795 – 1881
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. Known as the "sage of Chelsea", his writings strongly influenced the intellectual and artistic culture of the Victorian era.
"Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself."
#suffering"Religion was the pole-star for my father. Rude and uncultivated as he otherwise was, it made him and kept him "in all points a man." Oh! when I think that al…"
#knowledge"The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully."
#life"I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine what…"
#truth"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter's Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."
#politics"The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in!"
#life"This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special diale…"
#writing"Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed still to all souls of men;—which Inner Light shone h…"
#religion"The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not have existed: accordingly he is here."
#life"I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarti…"
#life"The all of things is an infinite conjugation of the verb to do."
"Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigab…"
#knowledge"Men do reverence men. Men do worship in that 'one temple of the world,' as Novalis calls it, the Presence of a Man! Hero- worship, true and blessed, or else …"
#religion"An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his “dwelling in the daylight of truth,” and so forth; which, on e…"
#time"O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of …"
#books"For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing somethin…"
#knowledge"There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done."
#knowledge"Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence, I owe him a noble inspiring example . It was he exclusively that dete…"
#life"it is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chie…"
#justice": A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things."
#truth