The Baroque Cycle Quotes

“But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“These simple terms—“come about,” for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“If you make certain assumptions about the force of gravity, and how the weight of an object diminishes as it gets farther away, it’s not improbable at all,” Isaac said. “It just happens. You would keep going round and round forever.” “In a circle?” “An ellipse.” “An ellipse…” and here the bomb finally went off in his head, and Daniel had to sit down on the ground, the moisture of last year’s fallen apples soaking through his breeches. “Like a planet.” “Just so—if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Gomer Bolstrood”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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?”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Three Desiderata: location, location, and location, this ruin has all!”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“She is in a house not thirty miles from here…a house that is for the time being unguarded, as the proprietor has been locked up in the Tower of London. How fortuitous, Sergeant!”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more æternal nature.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“had in mind a Dr. Waterhouse,” Eliza said. “He was cut for the stone recently.” The Marquis got the same aghast, cringing, yet fascinated look that all men did whenever the topic of lithotomy arose”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Copyright”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.” “It’s simple, really…” “And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow—excessive sobriety, e.g…” “A tendency to fret—” Pepys put in. “Undue chastity—let’s back to the tavern!”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking—is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?” “You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“He was of an age where it was never possible to pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another just so. They gained reputations as conjurors. Others found their errands running at cross purposes and were never able to do anything; they ended up seeming mad, or else perceived the futility of what they were doing and gave up, or turned to drink.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Paganism? Then we are all pagans! It is a symbol of Mercury—patron of commerce—who has been worshipped in this cellar—and in this city—for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adopts the shape of any container—”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World