Percival Lowell quotes

Percival Lowell was an American author, astronomer, and diplomat, best known for his theories about Mars and its canals. His writings popularized the idea of intelligent life on Mars and influenced both science and science fiction. He also founded the Lowell Observatory, where the planet Pluto was later discovered. Here are 8 of his quotes:

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.

Percival Lowell

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

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.

Percival Lowell

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?

Percival Lowell

Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants.

Percival Lowell

War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realize that there are better ways for practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of insuring the survival of the fittest. It is something a people outgrow.

Percival Lowell

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.

Percival Lowell