A Quote by Catherine Wilson

Leibniz accepted the argument that there must be indestructible simple entities if there is to be a complex world, but Epicurean morals and politics and anti-theology dismayed him. His 'monadology' which said that the true atoms of nature were unextended 'living mirrors,' was an imaginative and beautiful system, and even in many ways more modern than Epicurean atomism, than Epicurean atomism, but there was a reactionary aspect to it.

Catherine Wilson

Quote Topics

Accepted Anti Argument Aspect Atoms Beautiful Complex Dismayed Entities Epicurean Even Him His Imaginative Indestructible Living Many Mirrors Modern Morals More Must Nature Politics Reactionary Said Simple System Than Theology True Ways Were Which World

Quote Author

Catherine Wilson
1822 - October 20, 1862

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

Ruth Reichl

For seventeenth-century astronomers, the Epicurean doctrine of multiple worlds separated by void space was seen to fit with the new Copernican system in which every star was a sun, and the universe was a vast place with no centre.

Catherine Wilson

Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.

Catherine Wilson

Some critics thought the ontology and theory of qualities absurd. No one had ever seen these little atoms, and furthermore, how could their mere arrangement produce a noisy, colourful, world in which day followed night and animals generated their own kind? Instead of a world created, cared, for and supervised by supernatural persons, the Epicureans appeared to the theologians to be assigning everything to chance. The latter were appalled by Lucretius's view of religion as cruel and oppressive and by the Epicurean insistence that death is the end of all experience.

Catherine Wilson

A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.

Will Durant

The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.

A. A. Gill

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.

Andrew Breitbart

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Thomas Jefferson

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

Thomas Jefferson

Once you have a child, that becomes your life, and while that's the way it should be, I sort of have a love affair with my work. Having said that, many of us work far too hard and we don't put enough value in the epicurean, sensual part of life.

Kim Cattrall

I sort of have a love affair with my work. Many of us work far too hard and we don't put enough value in the epicurean, sensual part of life.

Kim Cattrall

I'm Volstag and what you see is what you get. He's a bon vivant lover of life epicurean goodfellow. He's a god, which helps. He's full of life. He reminds me very much of Falstaff. There's a wonderful innocence to him and the steadfast loyalty of a big Saint Bernard dog.

Ray Stevenson

Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.

Thomas B. Macaulay

I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.