Percival Lowell Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points.

Percival Lowell
Irrigation, unscientifically conducted, would not give us such truly wonderful mathematical fitness [as we observe in the Martian canals].... A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see-a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various department of our own public works.

Percival Lowell
To account for these phenomena, the explanation that at once suggests itself is, that a direct transference of water takes place over the face of the planet, and that the canals are so many waterways.

Percival Lowell
Man is merely this earth's highest production up to date.

Percival Lowell
Imagination is the single source of the new... reason, like a balance wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason... compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us the answer in terms of the here and now, which we call the actual. But the actual... does not mark the limit of the possible.

Percival Lowell
A planet may in a very real sense be said to have life of its own, of which what we call life may or may not be a subsequent detail. It is born, has its fiery youth, sobers into middle age, and just before this happens brings forth, if it be going to do so at all, the creatures on its surface which are, in a sense, its offspring.

Percival Lowell
Let us not cheat ourselves with words. Conservatism sounds finely, and covers any amount of ignorance and fear.

Percival Lowell
Now, between the truths we take for granted because of their age, and those we question because of their youth, we are apt to forget that in both, proof is nothing but preponderance of probability.

Percival Lowell
Now when we think that each of these stars is probably the centre of a solar system grander than our own, we cannot seriously take ourselves to be the only minds in it all.

Percival Lowell
From time immemorial travel and discovery have called with strange insistence to him who, wandering on the world, felt adventure in his veins. The leaving familiar sights and faces to push forth into the unknown has with magnetic force drawn the bold to great endeavor and fired the thought of those who stayed at home.

Percival Lowell
Ever since celestial mechanics in the skillful hands of Leverrier and Adams led to the world-amazed discovery of Neptune, a belief has existed begotten of that success that still other planets lay beyond, only waiting to be found.

Percival Lowell
We pride ourselves upon being men of the world, forgetting that this is but objectionable singularity unless we are, in some wise, men of more worlds than one.

Percival Lowell
That we are in some wise kin to all the rest of the cosmos science has been steadily demonstrating more and more clearly. The essential oneness of the universe is the goal to which all learning tends.

Percival Lowell
For animals and plants, too perishable to endure, have left their stamp behind, and even footprints of past reptiles confront us, legible still on the hardened sands of time, as if made yesterday in the spots they traversed hundreds of centuries ago.

Percival Lowell
Girdling their globe and stretching from pole to pole, the Martian canal system not only embraces their whole world, but is an organized entity. Each canal joins another, which in turn connects with a third, and so on over the entire surface of the planet.

Percival Lowell
All deduction rests ultimately upon the data derived from experience. This is the tortoise that supports our conception of the cosmos.

Percival Lowell
Like the savage who fears nothing so much as a strange man, like Crusoe who grows pale at the sight of footprints not his own, the civilized thinker instinctively turns from the thought of mind other than the one he himself knows.

Percival Lowell
If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and the resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the hosts of orbs around him. He learns that, though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space.

Percival Lowell
Only the accustomed and the commonplace do men take kindly at once. The strange terrifies them. It is with ideas in men as with unfamiliar sights in beasts. Both shy at first at what they have never seen before. Scientists and layman alike are afraid to commit themselves to that upon which they have not been brought up.

Percival Lowell
The theory of the existence of intelligent life on Mars may be likened to the atomic theory in chemistry in that in both we are led to the belief in units which we are alike unable to define.

Percival Lowell
A steady atmosphere is essential to the study of planetary detail; size of instrument being a very secondary matter. A large instrument in poor air will not begin to show what a smaller one in good air will. When this is recognized, as it eventually will be, it will become the fashion to put up observatories where they can see rather than be seen.

Percival Lowell
There are celestial sights more dazzling, spectacles that inspire more awe, but to the thoughtful observer who is privileged to see them well, there is nothing in the sky so profoundly impressive as the canals of Mars. Fine lines and little gossamer filaments only, cobwebbing the face of the Martian disk, but threads to draw one's mind after them across the millions of miles of intervening void.

Percival Lowell
Gauge your work by its truth to nature, not by the plaudits it receives from man. In the end the truth will prevail and though you may never live to see it, your work will be recognized after you are gone.

Percival Lowell
Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning.

Percival Lowell
The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear.

Percival Lowell