Alfred Romer quotes

Alfred Romer quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.”
-- Alfred Romer

#Knowledge Quotes #Loss Quotes #Paleontology Quotes

“The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.”
“Even more exasperating than the guy who thinks he knows it all is the one who really does.”
“One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.”
“We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.”
“In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece.”
“The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.”
“To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.”

Source : "Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World" by Abraham Pais, (p. 134), 1988.
“Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”
“Human paleontology shares a peculiar trait with such disparate subjects as theology and extraterrestrial biology: it contains more practitioners than objects for study.”
“The facts of paleontology seem to support creation and the flood rather than evolution. For instance, all the major groups of invertebrates appear "suddenly" in the first fossil ferrous strata (Cambrian) of the earth with their distinct specializations indicating that they were all created almost at the same time.”

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