Quicksilver
Neal Stephenson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.”
“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”
“This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.”
“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”
“Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.”
“If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules”
“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
“You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.”
“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”
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Book Keywords:
predestination, point-of-view, money, omniscience, latin, humour, relationships, free-will, question, labyrinth, women
