Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.
Interpretation
Science offers explanations and discoveries that exceed the myths of ancient stories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes that the advancements and explanations provided by science have outstripped the fantastical and often unfounded stories found in mythology. While myths served to explain the world in ancient times, modern science has provided a more accurate and profound understanding of reality, thus rewriting our comprehension of the universe and its workings.
In practice
In a lecture about the progression of human knowledge, you could incorporate this quote to highlight the importance of scientific understanding.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.
Given exponential growth dynamics of infectious diseases, containing an epidemic is straightforward early on, but nearly impossible once a disease spreads among a population.
From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
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