Under the Microscope: This week I offer you a random selection of quotations, mainly on wisdom. I hope you enjoy mulling them over in the summer sunshine, writes Prof William Reville.
"Basic research may seem very expensive. I am a well-paid scientist. My hourly wage is equal to that of a plumber, but sometimes my research remains barren of results for weeks, months or years and my conscience begins to bother me for wasting taxpayers' money. But, in reviewing my life's work, I have to think that the expense was not wasted.
Basic research, to which we owe everything, is relatively very cheap when compared with other outlays of modern society. The other day I made a rough calculation, which led me to the conclusion that if one were to add up all the money ever spent by man on basic research, one would find it to be just about equal to the money spent by the Pentagon this past year." (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
"The worst prison would be a closed heart." (Pope John Paul II)
"Each day is a little life. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"Rather fail with honour than succeed by fraud." (Sophocles)
"I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains. (Anne Frank)
"My life is my message." (Mahatma Ghandi)
"We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe." (Cardinal Newman)
"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made." (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
"It does not require many words to speak the truth." (Chief Joseph)
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing on one's own sunshine." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live." (Samuel Johnson)
"The cost of a thing is the amount of life that must be exchanged for it." (Henry David Thoreau)
"The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise." (Henry David Thoreau)
"When a dog runs at you, whistle for him." (Henry David Thoreau)
"Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to be a man of value." (Albert Einstein)
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." (Albert Einstein)
"No man is a failure who is enjoying life." (William Feather)
"Think you can, think you can't; either way you'll be right." (Henry Ford)
"It's not the employer who pays the wages. The employers only handle the money. It's the customer who pays the wages." (Henry Ford)
"If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn." (Andrew Mason)
"The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children." (Clarence Darrow)
"You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long." (Boris Yeltsin)
"Humour makes all things tolerable." (Henry Ward Beecher)
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon)
"If you don't paddle your own canoe, you don't move." (Katharine Hepburn)
"Character is much easier kept than recovered." (Thomas Paine)
"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence." (New England Saying)
"Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward." (Soren Kierkegaard)
"I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met!" (Dwight L Moody)
"When you were born, the world rejoiced and you cried; live your life so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice." (Cherokee saying)
"It is better to travel well than to arrive." (Buddha)
"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." (Buddha)
"What we think, we become." (Buddha)
"Luxury is more deadly than any foe." (Juvenal)
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." (Blaise Pascal)
"The Kingdom of Heaven is within you . . . seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all things will be added onto you." (Jesus Christ)
"Fear is only as deep as the mind allows." (Japanese proverb)
"I write music with an exclamation point!" (Richard Wagner)
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." (Mark Twain)
"Ambition can creep as well as soar." (Edmund Burke)
"The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth." (Chinese proverb)
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain." (Robert Frost)
"Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that." (Norman Vincent Peale)
• William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC - http://understandingscience.ucc.ie.