Gould Quotes

The fold is that place where He keeps His flock shut behind the hurdles of the Ten Commandments. Every now and then, a sheep leaps one of these hurdles or pushes his way between them and runs away into forbidden pastures. Then the Good Shepherd goes after the erring sheep and brings it back. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Wisdom, Power and Goodness meet
In the bounteous field of wheat. ~ Hannah Flagg Gould

Why do some bald guys grow ponytails? It it the same reason people too old to run always wear track shoes and sweat pants? ~ Dana Gould

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it. ~ Glenn Gould

I was a tap dancer as a child, so I understand precision and repetition. ~ Elliott Gould

...Under the veil of Mythology lies a solid Reality. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

My dog keeps looking at me as if he knows my secret, as if he and he alone can see my soul. That or he wants this pork chop. ~ Dana Gould

That which does not kill you usually circles around and tries again. ~ Dana Gould

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Man, double-faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp, precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident [ ... ] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence ... I had to place myself amidst the variation. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion? ~ Stephen Jay Gould

What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law? ~ Dennis Lehane

I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Like many indelible family memories, carving a pumpkin begins with someone grabbing a really sharp knife. ~ Dana Gould

I feel very uncomfortable when I eat in restaurants. I'm obnoxiously polite with the waiters: 'I just want a tuna sandwich. I'll go get it. You sit here - I'll get it, I'll make it. ~ Dana Gould

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I'd let her sell it to Dad. They tended not to contradict each other so if one of them had already said "yes" it usually meant "yes." If one of them said "no", ditto
which was why I'd asked Mom first. ~ Steven Gould

I'd thought about this for a long time. "That bank loses that much money in bad loans every
month. They make that much money in interest every day. They're a big bank. The money I
took was small change to them. No depositor was hurt."
She shook her head. "I still can't approve of it. I don't think it's right."
I felt my face go remote, still. I crossed my arms and felt cold.
She spread her hands. "It doesn't change the fact that I still love you. I've missed you terribly.
I've missed your phone calls, and I've missed your body in bed next to me. I don't know what
to do about this. My loving you goes way beyond my disapproval of your theft."
I uncrossed my arms and reached across the table for her. She leaned forward and we kissed
until the candle burned a hole in my shirt. Then we laughed and I held an ice cube to the
burn and the food came and everything was all right. ~ Steven Gould

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt. ~ Emily Gould

I always put a lot of priority on my education, even if that means taking classes after work or on the weekends. ~ Nolan Gould

Is there an award for the best trophy? I bet they hand out a plaque. ~ Dana Gould

Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [ ... ] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Science can't tell us what our life means ethically. It can't tell us what we are meant to do as moral creatures. But, insofar as science can understand what we're made of, and what we're related to, the Darwinian revolution completely revised our ideas about who we are and what we're related to and how long we've been here and why we're on this Earth. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Many stroke survivors look back on their attack as a stroke of luck. Of course, by luck they mean horrible paralysis. ~ Dana Gould

My father hauled boxes so I could get an education and earn enough money to pay someone to make me lift weights. ~ Dana Gould

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality). ~ Stephen Jay Gould

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing ~ Glenn Gould

I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need x number of hours alone. Now, what that x represents I don't really know, whether it be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it's a substantial ratio. ~ Glenn Gould

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a 'misfiring of something useful', it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d'Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this "scientism" have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other "new atheists" – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and "poisons everything." They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.

But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that s ~ Karen Armstrong

It's been years since any hillbilly has reported getting sodomized by an alien. Did they break up and not tell us? ~ Dana Gould

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I don't know the time frame exactly, but it's clear they're all going to want to start spending money again. ~ Andrew Gould

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I sometimes think I should like to give up business entirely. The care and worriment attending large business interests are very great, but besides that fact the manner in which motives are impugned and characters assailed is most unpleasant ~ Jay Gould

I know that big, important things don't just come together overnight, but I've been me for a long time now and it's still not working. ~ Dana Gould

Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The papers are portraying Rafa as a parrot, just like they did when they showed Graham Taylor as an onion ~ Bobby Gould

I do know people and there are people in my family who have had Alzheimer's and dementia, and I appreciate the importance of communication and having contact with them. Communicating is an interesting thing with a condition like that. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate. If the brain becomes atrophied or certain channels of the brain become atrophied, then contact is what becomes really important. ~ Elliott Gould

About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf.

Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this
riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb.

Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incom ~ James Gould Cozzens

The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations. ~ Elizabeth Gould Davis

They say that cats are the only animal that can sit in your lap and ignore you. To which I say: you've never been to the Spearmint Rhino. ~ Dana Gould

Just saw a woman with a big tattoo of Jesus on her back. I guess it's an ixnay on the oggy style-day. ~ Dana Gould

My problem was I let myself become known before I knew myself. ~ Elliott Gould

I thoroughly believe in evolution, and how we evolve and how our physical being is affected by time and use and by the environment ... it's more than just challenging, it can be terrifying. We all struggle, but I think it's important to be there for one another. ~ Elliott Gould

Where is the good will in the thought, I was going to throw this in the garbage, do you want to wear it? ~ Dana Gould

The Devonian and Cornishman will be found by the visitor to be courteous and hospitable. There is no roughness of manner where unspoiled by periodic influx of strangers; he is kindly, tender-hearted, and somewhat suspicious. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Women are like pumpkins; you search and search for the perfect one, bring it home, and the next thing you know, you're looking for a knife. ~ Dana Gould

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed. ~ Glenn Gould

I don't mind being alone when I'm surrounded by people, I just hate being alone when I'm alone. ~ Dana Gould

The older I get, the more I look like my favorite shoes. ~ Dana Gould

The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small. ~ James Gould Cozzens

Why is it, when I have nothing to do, I drink more coffee? It's as if I'm in a big hurry to get nothing done. ~ Dana Gould

Why do I always meet women as I'm leaving the dog park with a big bag of poop? And it's always on the day I forgot my dog ... ~ Dana Gould

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer. ~ Emily Gould

I like to think of Doritos as emotional packing material to safeguard the feelings I've swallowed. ~ Dana Gould

As hipster chicks age, and their skin starts to sag, tramp stamps sink below waistbands, like the sun slipping into the sea ... ~ Dana Gould

If I had a dreamcatcher when I was thirteen, it would have spent many long days in the dryer. ~ Dana Gould

It might not be rational, but I am terrified of getting stuck in an elevator with a bear. ~ Dana Gould

Did you know that Dog Heaven and Cat Hell were the same place? ~ Dana Gould

Loneliness is the alchemy that turns an adolescent into an adult. Adolescents are profoundly lonely, but believe that their pangs will be solved by finding a lover, while the adult recognizes loneliness as the defining term of the human condition. ~ Joan Gould

Groucho Marx, in his later days, gave me the best review I've ever had and probably will ever have. I changed a light bulb over his bed, and when I came off of his bed with the used one after putting the new one in, Groucho said, 'That's the best acting I've ever seen you do.' ~ Elliott Gould

We must categorize and simplify in order to comprehend. But the reduction of complexity entails a great danger, since the line between enlightening epitome and vulgarized distortion is so fine. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The north coast of Brittany is eaten into bays from which the sea retreats to considerable distances, and is fringed with reefs and islands. It is a favourite resort of Parisians throughout its stretch, from Dinard to Plestin. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

Finally, spurred by the appetite to which he was indifferent, he took any one, read the printing on the parti-colored label of paper. He held the soup can like a skull; and at once he did not want it. The soup was made from celery. Mr. Lecky put it back. He stood in mild misery, harassed again by the plague of a will impotent in its restored freedom.
If the mind cannot direct, it can be cunning to protect its ease. Mr. Lecky now proposed a fantastic pact to himself. He shut his eyes. He reached again and took a can. Eyes still shut, he ripped the label from it, crumpled and threw away the paper. Now he could not tell what he had until he opened it. ~ James Gould Cozzens

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The simple act of smiling at people makes the world a better place. Unless it's the day you decide to walk around with your dong out. ~ Dana Gould

For 'Breaking Bad,' our offices were in the ugliest building in Burbank, California. Which, if you know Burbank, is really saying something. ~ Peter Gould

Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I would judge the sanest man to be him who most firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly. I suppose I feel about it this way because I have a delusion of grandeur. I believe myself to be Joe Gould. ~ Joe Gould

... is inhabited by a Mrs. Buckle,four children,a fat black woman, and myself and a man. ~ Robert Gould Shaw

The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I went to Iceland in 1861 and went over nearly every bit of the ground made famous by the adventures of Grettir. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

God was there when it happened. We were not there ... Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The weird thing about old Playboys is knowing that the naked woman is now an old lady. I said weird. I didn't say bad. ~ Dana Gould

How do I ask my shrink to stop responding to everything I say with, Too much information! and then giggling behind a pillow? ~ Dana Gould

If God had wanted women to have giant, fake boobs he'd be a lot like my brother. ~ Dana Gould

Let's all start wearing bolo ties, and when they become hip again, we'll all say we were kidding. ~ Dana Gould

As Global Warming raises temparatures, it takes longer to cool pies on window sills, and I wonder if this whole thing was caused by hobos. ~ Dana Gould

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.

But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don't know what I don't know. There are universes of things out there - ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions - that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don't know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.

Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can't help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.

[…]

I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thi ~ Debbie Millman

The Elephant Man claimed his head was big because, it's so full of dreams. Actually, it's because his skull was shaped like a turkey. ~ Dana Gould

I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [ ... ] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

That which does not kill you isn't finished. ~ Dana Gould

Practically the whole world depends on coral reefs, so if the coral reefs get all killed, then the ocean will start going out of whack, and if the ocean goes out of whack, something might happen on land. ~ Alexander Gould

My take on celebrity is simply that some of us have to make a bigger fool of ourselves than others. ~ Elliott Gould

It's a beautiful city, and the waterfront area is fantastic. I haven't had time to visit the theatre, but I find it remarkable that Toronto has the third-largest English-speaking theatre district in the world, after New York and London. I once noticed a fellow sitting on a bench, then I realized it was a statue of Glenn Gould. It's very realistic. ~ Donald Trump

My potential salvation ... must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha"
while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Mr. Lecky could see well enough to eat. He brought his chair over and sat down gratefully while he consumed, but with appetite now, the ham and biscuits which he had disdained in the morning. Even the fact that he was using to cut his ham the knife which had cut a human throat did not disturb him. He had taken care to see that the blade was wiped clean. ~ James Gould Cozzens

Marriage is like a row boat: it fits two, it doesn't work on auto-pilot and it's very difficult to have sex in. ~ Dana Gould

Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages or who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases. ~ Stephen Jay Gould