“ For example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism a… Peter Watson
“ A useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only,… Peter Watson
“ One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been. Peter Watson
“ He adored talking about the rich…. But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. In… Peter Watson
“ For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law? Peter Watson
“ The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both o… Peter Watson
“ Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is… Peter Watson
“ Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatu… Peter Watson
“ Has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the s… Peter Watson
“ Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, believed there were three o… Peter Watson
“ Grief is an ocean where the waves obey their own rhythm, their own tide, where we are just thrown about to stay afloat as best we can. Where there is in fact no guarantee that we will keep our heads a… Peter Watson
“ Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in it's grip, it won't let go. It spoils everything. Peter Watson
“ Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protesta… Peter Watson
“ At its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linke… Peter Watson
“ In some ways this was Goethe’s greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where the real joints of nature are located, is mo… Peter Watson
“ Genetic evidence, of individuals across the world, alive now, shows that all non-African people are descended from one small group that must have passed through the Arabian peninsula. Peter Watson
“ From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as Sie, and must use the more intimate du. This brought about a se… Peter Watson
“ The discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving.… Peter Watson
“ The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, ho… Peter Watson
