Quotes by John Pipkin

It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.

Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.

It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.

The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past.

Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.

But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.