Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.
Interpretation
Science offers explanations and discoveries that exceed the myths of ancient stories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes that the advancements and explanations provided by science have outstripped the fantastical and often unfounded stories found in mythology. While myths served to explain the world in ancient times, modern science has provided a more accurate and profound understanding of reality, thus rewriting our comprehension of the universe and its workings.
In practice
In a lecture about the progression of human knowledge, you could incorporate this quote to highlight the importance of scientific understanding.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.
From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work - not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.
Fortunately, there's another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward - as an investment in our economy.
I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we're not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away.
It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
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