notion quotes

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us An'foolish notion.

- Robert Burns
  'To a Louse, On Seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet at Church', stanza 8.

   We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoined together, and whichinall past instanceshavebeenfound inseparable.

- David Hume
  A  Treatise of Human Nature, bk.1, pt.3, section 6.

   Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

-T(homas) H(enry) Huxley
  Letter to Charles Kingsley.

SoTomwent homewith Ellie†and heisnowa great man of science†and knows everything about everything, except whya hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things which no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues. And all this fromwhat helearnt whenhewas awater-baby, underneaththesea. 'And of course,Tom married Ellie?'My dear child, what a silly notion! Don't you know that no one ever marries in a fairy tale, under the rank of a prince or a princess?

- Charles Kingsley
  The Water Babies, ch.8.

But even Archimedes was not free from the prevailing notion that geometry was degraded by being employed to produce anything useful. It was with difficulty that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed of those inventions which were the wonder of hostile nations, and always spoke of them slightingly as mere amusements, as trifles in which a mathematician might be suffered to relax his mind after intense application to the higher parts of his science.

-1st Baron
  'Basil Montagu's edition of  The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England ', in the Edinburgh Review,  Jul.

It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay moneyas they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.

- Gertrude Stein
  On the first state lottery of1710. In theTatler, no.124, 24 Jan.

Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong.That is of a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.

-James Grover Thurber
Recalled on his death, 2 Nov1961.