Probe Quotes

Children's Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven. ~ R.S. Thomas

I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours ... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end. ~ Christopher Isherwood

[M]y wish is, that the Convention may adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution [i.e., the Articles of Confederation] to the bottom, and provide radical cures. ~ George Washington

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old. ~ A.P.

Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. ~ Michio Kaku

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, a fellow space traveler because he helped make the journey into the final frontier accessible to us all ... Indeed, there are strange new worlds to explore
to seek out new life and start new civilizations. It is time to boldly go where no man
or woman
has gone before. Thanks to Leonard Nimoy and his beloved Mr. Spock, the bar has been set high for us to continue humanity's quest to probe outward in the universe. ~ Buzz Aldrin

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. ~ Annie Dillard

[P]rescientific people ... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero. ~ E. O. Wilson

The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work. ~ Max Beckmann

My final two cents worth of advice is to develop an all-consuming curiosity for things both exotic and ordinary. Read, observe, analyze, and become involved with a variety of interests. Study, practice, delve, probe, investigate, and above all, be flexible. Keep an open mind. The world is changing fast. Don't get caught in the corner of the ring.
- Ward Kimball ~ John Canemaker

I think about the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass, and I can barely comprehend it. My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they'd worked on for years just to provide a booster.
The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollar. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother?
Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true.
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side.
Pretty cool, eh? ~ Andy Weir

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. ~ Tennessee Williams

[ ... ] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands. ~ Jim Morrison

Studying Sol's interior by looking for analogous patterns on its incandescent face is known as helioseismology, an active - if largely unpronounceable - research area that uses sound as a probe of our home star. ~ Seth Shostak

Abandon certainty! That's life's deepest command. That's what life's all about. We're a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can't you hear Muad'Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that's only death disguised! Such a future becomes now! ~ Frank Herbert

The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only get more good out of life and feel more kindly toward our fellows, but doubtless the rectitude of our intellects would increase, and the justice of our judgments ... we are so shut away from one another that none tells those about him what he considers ideal treatment on their part toward him ... nothing will probe to the core of this greatest disadvantage under which we labor
that is, mutual noncomprehension
except a basis of society and government which would make it easy for each to put himself in another's place because his place is so much like another's ... we [would] need less imagination in order to do that which is just and kind to every one about us. ~ Frances E. Willard

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option. ~ David Eagleman

Knowledge is the ability to love, the ability to feel, the ability to probe the depths and the heights of life. It is the experience of the experiencer, and at the same time, it is beyond that. ~ Frederick Lenz

Music was not always my fan. Sometimes there were lean years, years where I was uncertain if I was doing the right or wrong thing. And years where there wasn't the acceptance, years of economic hardships, and failures. That's when you get to know either who you are, what you're made of, or what's inside of you. If you don't probe deeper, you'll never know, and you can't go on. ~ Gino Vannelli

The Abbe Paul looked at Agnes rather as Alain had, with respect. 'How sensible. People are desperate to probe mysteries which for the most part are best left unprobed. It is the modern curse: this demented drive to explain every blessed thing. Not everything can be explained. Nor should be, I think. ~ Salley Vickers

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit ... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul. ~ Guy De Maupassant

A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty. ~ Zbigniew Herbert

Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself. ~ Owen Gingerich

A job interview is a two-way communication to probe for cultural and team fit. No matter which side of the table you sit, you should be asking questions that are important to you without fear. ~ Salil Jha

Normal people look at me. They see the surface of me, the appealing outer shell. They never delve any deeper. But you…your eyes probe and they search. It feels fucking real when you look at me. After thirty seven years of being admire and coveted because of the way my genetics predetermined what my features would look like, it's refreshing to be fucking see, Sera. ~ Callie Hart

Desire is the outcome of sensation - the outcome with all the images that thought has built. And this desire not only breeds discontent but a sense of hopelessness.
Never suppress it, never discipline it but probe into the nature of it - what is the origin, the purpose, the intricacies of it? To delve deep into it is not another desire, for it has no motive; it is like understanding the beauty of a flower, to sit down beside it and look at it. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

I just watched an episode where Steve Austin fights a Russian Venus probe that landed on Earth by mistake. As an expert in interplanetary travel, I can tell you there are no scientific inaccuracies in the story. It's quite common for probes to land on the wrong planet. Also, the probe's large, flat-panel hull is ideal for the high-pressure Venusian atmosphere. And, as we all know, probes often refuse to obey directives, choosing instead to attack humans on sight. So ~ Andy Weir

The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable. ~ Stanley Fish

Pull - don't push. Investigate - don't present. Probe - don't pitch. Ask - don't assume. How? Talk less - listen more. Make fewer statements - ask more questions. ~ Darren Hardy

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?
Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles
to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him and - The essential impact of life's loneliness crushed his beginning-to-tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her family's love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she would find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it was an individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there. ~ Ray Bradbury

Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing. ~ Jerome Groopman

Question of Official Secrets Act confronts Delhi Police probe By Shreeja Sen | 553 words New Delhi: Investigations into an alleged corporate espionage case are on at full steam, the Delhi Police said on Sunday even as it held around a dozen people in detention after confidential documents were stolen from the petroleum ministry. With the detainees yet to be charged, the police are proceeding only under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 - Sections 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) and 120B (criminal conspiracy). ~ Anonymous

Mann was conscious of adopting different perspectives in different parts of the novella, but my guess is that there are plenty of passages in which the resonance of the words he chose struck him as exactly right (even though he didn't probe to discover exactly what tone or narrative device gave them that effect). ~ Philip Kitcher

The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self. We see the signal of consciousness in a gleaming eye and imagine some ethereal space beneath the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns of feeling and thought, charged with intention. An essence. But what do we find in that space behind the face, when we look? The brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain ... You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There's no one there. ~ Thomas Metzinger

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you. ~ Kevin Mitnick

We fantasize an archaeological scoop. Meanwhile what we have right before us turns out to be far more useful - a theological probe. Instead of being told what Jeremiah's parents were doing, we are told what his God was doing: "Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: A prophet to the nations - that's what I had in mind for you" (Jer 1:5). ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecraft, here to probe our airspace and, when that proves boring, our bodies. ~ Seth Shostak

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment - of what's really going on - affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. ~ Steven Pinker

Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one's own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results. ~ Donald Kennedy

[Egyptian] advances in medicine, however, as well as in other areas of science, were limited to their attempts to solve the problems confronting them. They did not attempt to probe into the realm of theory.
"History for the Egyptians was the cyclic recurrence of the elements of the divine eternal order. Just as the land was reborn each year, so the pharaoh who died and became Osiris was reborn in Horus, his son and successor. The passage of time was marked by the succession of pharaohs, who were grouped into dynasties and numbered. ~ Norman F. Cantor

True, the name of the product wasn't so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time - worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft's Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful. ~ Nicholson Baker

You only love when you love in vain.
Try another radio probe
when ten have failed,
take two hundred rabbits
when a hundred have died:
only this is science.
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again. ~ Miroslav Holub

But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since."
"this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

We do not deceive ourselves that we are engaging in an activity that is anything but debilitating, dangerous, euphoric, kinesthetic, expensive, frivolously essential, economically useless and totally without redeeming social significance. One should not probe for
deeper meanings. ~ Allen Steck

Is it right to probe so deeply into Nature's secrets? The question must here be raised whether it will benefit mankind, or whether the knowledge will be harmful. ~ Pierre Curie

As you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects. And this sometimes gets me into trouble. ~ Ronald Kessler

Or maybe aliens had abducted him - yeah, that was what happened. Knowing Evan, he'd spot the anal probe and want to try it out on them. ~ Finn Marlowe

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted. ~ Eric Idle

"Humanism" is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things - beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature - both organic and inorganic-to colors, shapes, and textures - to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it "Humanism." ~ Jacob Lawrence

Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind's misery. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Find out what faith is and how you can put it into practice.
Learn how to pray, and do it.
Discover what pride is, and get rid of it.
Develop a self-concept that is adequate and accurate.
Clarify your values.
Identify your talents.
Probe the fact, meaning, and use of your sexuality.
Face the fact that you engage in self-deception.
Reflect on truth that you are made in the image of God.
Use your spiritual gift.
Clear your conscience.
Feel deeply.
Enjoy life.
Face death.
Treat your body right.
Conquer the flesh.
Depend on the Holy Spirit.
Be humble. ~ J. Grant Howard

But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing? ~ Gregory Bateson

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

One of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence - he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers. ~ Jon Meacham

Ambulances were cool. "You just want to fondle my extraneous body parts," I said to the EMT as I picked up a silver gadget that looked disturbingly like an alien orifice probe, broke it, then promptly put it back, hoping it wouldn't leave someone's life hanging in the balance because the EMT couldn't alien-probe his orifices. ~ Darynda Jones

[08:31] JPL: Good, keep us posted on any mechanical or electronic problems. By the way, the name of the probe we're sending is Iris. Named after the Greek goddess who traveled the heavens with the speed of wind. She's also the goddess of rainbows. [08:47] WATNEY: Gay probe coming to save me. Got it. ~ Andy Weir

As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address. ~ Jeremy Denk

There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen. ~ Ridley Pearson

Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go ~ Robert W. Service

How fantastic that the American ingenuity of NASA scientists got us to Mars. It makes me proud to be an American. I can't get enough of these images from when the probe touched down. These scientists are American heroes. ~ Jennifer Granholm

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company. ~ Milan Kundera

Y'know scientists are funny. We probe and measure and dissect. Invent lights without heat, weigh a caterpillar's eyebrow. But whenit comes to really important things we're as stupid as the caveman ... Like love. Makes the world go 'round, but what do we know about it? Is it a fact? Is it chemistry? Electricity? ~ Martin Berkeley

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ~ Grant Morrison

I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The very small quantum world, it seems, is a mixture of possibilities. The quantum fields to which all particles belong are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, one possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by seeing it, just by the very act of detecting it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. Nobody knows why or how this happens. ~ Christophe Galfard

Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know? ~ Henry Miller

He knew that he'd known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things. ~ Robert Hellenga

NASA even sent Chuck Berry's music on a space probe searching for intelligent life in outer space. Well, now, if they're out there, they're duck walking ~ William J. Clinton

Heartsick, heartbroken - to know love is to know pain. What could be more common? Even so, each broken heart is so singular that with it we probe the divine. ~ Rumi

You have a case, Holmes?" I remarked. "The faculty of deduction is certainly contagious, Watson," he answered. "It has enabled you to probe my secret. Yes, I have a case. After a month of trivialities and stagnation the wheels move once more. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, ~ Anonymous

The day is not far off when we will be able to send a robotically controlled genome-sequencing unit in a probe to other planets to read the DNA sequence of any alien microbe life that may be there. ~ Craig Venter

By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams - lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority - it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are - only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchange of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act - the most intimate ~ Ernest Becker

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you. ~ Ray Dalio

He angled his mouth across hers, his kiss gentle, seductive, but sweet in a way that made her forget they were standing naked in the middle of the ocean. It was a kiss that explored more than the physical. He seemed to probe her emotions as well, and laid his own out for her to do with what she would. ~ M.J. Fredrick

If a beautiful women expressed interest in me and my company, I don't really probe their motivations. Call me shallow. ~ Hugh Hefner

On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles
as well as poetry and emotions. ~ F. David Peat

According to one account of the New York City schools during the 1950s: The teacher could not technically hit the child, but the old crones found ways of skirting the rules. The push-probe-pull method was popular, in which the teacher would not hit you, but would poke you with her gnarled, witch-like fingers and grab your face like a taffy pull until you screamed. ... The pull-and-choke was also a favorite. It was executed by pulling the compulsory necktie up like a noose, until the errant boy's face turned the school colors. ~ Robert Klein

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights ... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper. ~ Margaret Bourke-White

Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses and exploit them to gain access to your most sensitive secrets. ~ Kevin Mitnick

This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck? ~ Douglas Adams

We are not about to build particle accelerators that can probe to distances that small. They would have to be larger than the solar system and they are not likely to be approved in the present financial climate. ~ Stephen Hawking

There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people. I'm talking about a writer's critics, who don't address what you've written, but want to probe into your existence and magnify the trivia of your life without any sense of humor, without any sense of context. ~ Wole Soyinka

What's wrong with the world?
It's easy to probe the ills of the nation, the Church, and the planet and come up with a grave diagnosis ... But it takes all the strength we can muster to stand at Mass and honestly say, 'I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do ...
Sin is not out there; it's deep inside you and me ... What's wrong with the world? I am, because I sin, and my sins well up from the darkness in my own heart. ~ Scott Hahn

If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The only way through pain ... is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth. ~ May Sarton

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline. ~ Burt Rutan

There is good news. Scientists sent a probe down there in the Gulf of Mexico today and they found traces of seawater. ~ Bill Maher

Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space. ~ Alan Huffman

Human beings cannot probe the mind of God by asking themselves what they would do if they were God. They are men and not God. And if they are virtuous men, they will wait for God to reveal himself under conditions of his own choosing. ~ Edward John Carnell

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema.
The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassoed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification.
[...]
The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recu ~ Angela Carter

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, "Stick it in!" With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer's rectum. This wasn't natural. This wasn't normal. At least it wasn't for me. This was definitely against God's plan.
I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer's left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm.
Tim said, "Okay, Ree, you can take it out now." I did. I didn't know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified.
The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something.
On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer's hip. At the la ~ Ree Drummond

Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the 'adjacent possible.' We didn't stay in the caves. We didn't stay on the planet, and soon we won't stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. ~ Jason Silva

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer I've spent a lot of time watching Earth - more than forty of that planet's years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one. ~ Robert Silverberg

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us. The Psalms do this, to begin with, simply because they are poetry set to music: a classic double art form. To write or read a poem is already to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions. Sometimes ~ N. T. Wright

They'd insert a probe into the patient's head to press the nodule and the patient's immediate response would be to shout out, "FUCK IT! WHY NOT? ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson