Skip to content

So far as thought may peer into the past, the epic of our solar system began with a great catastrophe. Two suns met. What had been, ceased; what was to be, arose. Fatal to both progenitors, the event dated a stupendous cosmic birth.

— Percival Lowell

Another quote →

More quotes by Percival Lowell

That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be.

Mars and its Canals (1906)

Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life?

Mars (1896)

Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning.

Mars and its Canals (1906)

The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear.

Mars and its Canals (1906)

In the great desert of northern Arizona the traveller, threading his way across a sage-brush and cacti plain shut in by abrupt-sided shelves of land rising here and there some hundreds of feet higher, suddenly comes upon a petrified forest.

All Percival Lowell quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Percival Lowell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.