Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?
Interpretation
Great scientific and artistic achievements often arise from simple ideas.
In this quote, Jules Verne emphasizes that the most profound discoveries and inventions in science and art stem from simplicity. By highlighting examples like gravitation and the printing press, he suggests that true genius often lies in the ability to distill complex ideas into simple, accessible concepts that can profoundly impact humanity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about innovation in technology.
Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.
It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil.
Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
However strong, however imposing a ship may appear, it is not 'disgraced' because it flies before the tempest. A commander ought always to remember that a man's life is worth more than the mere satisfaction of his own pride. In any case, to be obstinate is blameable, and to be wilful is dangerous.
The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.
Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy.
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.
Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.
A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
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