It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
Quotes about chimeras (5 Quotes)
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue of teaching ministers to consult the public good of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.
O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.
Storied of old in high immortal verse Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles, And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell.