The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that scientific pursuits often collect knowledge without necessarily applying it practically.
Ralph Waldo Emerson compares the sciences, particularly mathematics and astronomy, to sportsmen who hunt for whatever opportunities come their way. This analogy implies that while scientists may gather vast amounts of knowledge and information, they don't always have a use for it, indicating a pursuit for discovery that may not immediately translate into practical application.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of interdisciplinary studies.
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?
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we donβt truly understand.
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.
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