Discover Magazine asked numerous scientists late last fall what truly great book remains to be written. Like all other books these days, science texts are a penny a million. The Discover article even began with this gem from Ecclesiastes: "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."
Here is how Sean Carroll, a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, replied to the question:
"The most important book that has not yet been written is Life In The Universe. This book would survey all of the places in the universe where life exists, the diversity among life-forms, and many hypotheses concerning the unique or multiple origins of life. This book has not yet been written because the science of exploring life both within and outside of our solar system is still in its infancy. The question of whether life is unique to Earth is in fact one of science's great unanswered questions. But I can think of no topic that would more profoundly affect our perspective of our place in the universe. Over the first 500 years of science, humanity's purported place at the center of the universe has been progressively stripped away, by astronomy, geology, and biology. Should we find ourselves to be the inhabitants of but one of many -- or a great many -- places where life exists, this would shake the foundations of human thought."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy Of Morals:
"Exactly what is it that I, especially, find intolerable; that I am unable to cope with; that asphyxiates me? A bad smell. The smell of failure, of a soul that has gone stale." Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia:
"Things have come to a pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry. Whatever lacks the trace of such pre-formation lacks credibility...Truth that opposes these pressures not only appears improbable, but is in addition too feeble to make any headway in competition with their highly-concentrated machinery of dissemination."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra And Simulation:
"Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age...it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody..."
Wendy Beckett, The Gaze Of Love:
"The eye that sees nobility and beauty in what another would regard as ordinary is the eye of prayer."
Albert Camus, Lyrical And Critical Essays:
"Our task as men is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish..."
Guy Debord, The Society Of The Spectacle:
"The spectator's consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his 'mirror image.' Here the stage is set with the false exit of generalized autism."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground:
"...we have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, we have lost touch so badly that we often feel a kind of loathing for genuine 'living life,' and hence cannot endure being reminded of it. We've reached the point where we virtually regard 'living life' as hard labor, almost servitude, and we all agree in private that it's much better 'according to the books.'"
Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey:
"There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains -- if anything contains -- the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves."
T.S. Eliot, The Idea Of A Christian Society:
"...what is more insidious than any censorship, is the steady influence which operates silently in any mass society organized for profit, for the depression of standards of art and culture. The increasing organization of advertisement and propaganda -- or the influencing of masses of men by any means except through their intelligence -- is all against them. The economic system is against them...and against them is the disappearance of any class of people who recognize public and private responsibility of patronage of the best that is made and written."
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity:
"[T]he present age...prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence...in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer:
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat."
William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience:
"The carnivorous-minded 'strong man,' the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? And must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?"
Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals:
"If people insist on calling my crumbs of wisdom sophistry I should just like to draw their attention to the fact that it lacks at least one of the characteristics, according to the definitions of both Plato and Aristotle: that one earns money with it."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy Of Morals:
"Exactly what is it that I, especially, find intolerable; that I am unable to cope with; that asphyxiates me? A bad smell. The smell of failure, of a soul that has gone stale."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy?:
"Why not be content without philosophizing, with what we find in the world, with what already is, what stands there clear before us? For this simple reason: all that there is, there in front of us, given to us, present and clear, is in its very essence a mere piece, a bit, a fragment, the stump of something absent. And we cannot see it without sensing and missing the part that is not there. In every given being, every datum of the world, we find its essential fracture line, its character as a part and only a part; we see the scar of its ontological mutilation...its nostalgia for the bit that is lacking, its divine discontent."
Max Planck, Where Is Science Going?
"Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And, indeed, it was not by any accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were also deeply religious souls, even though they made no public show of their religious feeling."
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notes Of Malte Laurids Brigge:
"We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors."
George Santayana, Platonism And The Spiritual Life:
"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded for ever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light among the thorns."
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Learning & The Learned":
"Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value...With the impressive erudition of those great pundits, I sometimes say to myself: 'Ah, how little they must have had to think about, to have been able to read so much!'"
Socrates, quoted in Plato's Apology:
"Were I to make any claim to be wiser than others, it would be because I do not think that I have any sufficient knowledge of the other world, when in fact I have none."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden:
"The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra And Simulation:
"People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging..."
Andre Breton, Manifesto Of Surrealism:
"...the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life. The activity of the best minds feels the effects of it; the law of the lowest common denominator finally prevails upon them as it does upon the others."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books:
"You should never look for genuine Christian convictions in a man who makes a parade of his piety."
Lewis Mumford, The Conduct Of Life:
"Western culture no longer represents man: it is mainly outside him, and in no small measure hostile to his whole self: he cannot take it in. He is like a patient condemned in the interests of X-ray photography to live upon a diet of barium sulphate...In the end, as Samuel Butler satirically prophesied, man may become just a machine's contrivance for reproducing another machine."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga And Paralipomena:
"To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents. To expect that a man should have retained all that he had ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body all that he had ever eaten."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture And Value:
"Freud's idea: In madness the lock is not destroyed, only altered; the old key can no longer unlock it, but it could be opened by a differently constructed key."
Raoul Vaneigem, The Book of Pleasures:
"The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our inhuman history has ever known. It will lift as life dawns. Death stares at our passions and we mute them; we mesh our desires with what is inimical to life; and we base the greater part of existence on the bloody search for profit and power...Once cloaked in divinity, then fleshed in ideology, power is now revealed in its bare bones: Economics. If this carries all the bets, the game from now on must go against us."
