Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And, according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing.
Interpretation
The quote compares Earth to a living being, suggesting it undergoes cycles of life similar to those in nature.
Isaac Newton's quote presents the idea that the Earth, like all living organisms, experiences a life cycle consisting of beginnings, growth, aging, and eventual decline. He poetically illustrates this concept by likening the planet to an animate creature that breathes and exhales, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the natural processes that sustain it.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of treating Earth with care.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
So really what it comes down to, it's God. Wherever you look, it's God appearing as this, that, that...and what you really love and appreciate in each form is the divine formless out of which each form comes. But to be able to sense that you have to sense it in yourself first. And that is seeing the beauty in everything, that's really what it means.
I still do not understand how a corporation can have person-hood if it has no soul and never dies.
When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose.
Nelson Mandela is physically separated from us, but his soul and spirit will never die. He belongs to the whole world because he is an icon of equality, freedom and love, the values we need all the time everywhere.
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