Alps/geography

Famous quotes containing the words alps and/or geography:

    But can see better there, and laughing there
    Pity the giants wallowing on the plain.
    ...
    Pygmies expand in cold impossible air,
    Cry fie on the giantshine, poor glory which
    Pounds breast-bone punily, screeches, and has
    Reached no Alps: or, knows no Alps to reach.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)