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Book: The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World
Quotes of Book: The Baroque Cycle:
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  1. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds.
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  2. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Thinking is what angels do-it is a property given to Man by God." "How do you suppose God gives it to us?" "I do not pretend to know, sir!" "If you take a man's brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence-the divine presence of God on Earth?" "That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists." "Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man's brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?" Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes."
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  3. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together-that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.
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  4. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    The Bourbon-Orléans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV.
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  5. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer's part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
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  6. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd In vision beatific; by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. -MILTON, Paradise Lost
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  7. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    What is the moral of your play, Jack?" "Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they've got Bibles, too." "Sound advice.
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  8. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, "What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible-you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?
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  9. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he'd purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac's sundial, because it didn't look like an old sundial, and they'd prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness-a manifesto like Luther's theses on the church-door.
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  10. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals-
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  11. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. "This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it-which must have been a great spiritual struggle-and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.
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  12. Neal Stephenson _ The Baroque Cycle:

    every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say 'tis the other way round.
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