Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity — the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the…
Book 1912
The Lost World quotes
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About the book
Young London reporter Edward Malone, eager to prove himself, joins the explosive Professor Challenger, his sceptical rival Professor Summerlee and the big-game hunter Lord John Roxton on an expedition to South America. They set out to test Challenger's claim that a remote plateau in the Amazon still holds creatures thought extinct for millions of years. It is a classic adventure story about science, rivalry and the thrill of the unknown.
7 quotes
The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere.
It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously, so that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations.
To a man of philosophic temperament like myself the blood-tick, with its lancet-like proboscis and its distending stomach, is as beautiful a work of Nature as the peacock or, for that matter, the aurora borealis.
The unknown is up against us on every side. Outside the narrow lines of the rivers what does anyone know? Who will say what is possible in such a country? Why should old man Challenger not be right?
But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back. I've never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.
It is not worth it. Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men — and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors — cannot affect the matter.