Words matter. These are the best Simon Newcomb Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When about fifteen I once made a great scandal by taking out my knife in prayer meeting and assaulting a young man who, while I was kneeling down during the prayer, stood above me and squeezed my neck.
Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.
The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.
In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America.
What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.
If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.
As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.
Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope.
My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.
The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.
In October, 1865, occurred what was, in my eyes, the greatest event in the history of the observatory. The new transit circle arrived from Berlin in its boxes.
As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.
Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.
Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.
