Frances Arnold Quotes

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.

Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.

We emerged out of nature, and when we die, we return to nature. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that we will never understand or control. We need to have sacred places where we go with respect, not just looking for resources or opportunity.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

For all of nature's wonder and beauty, it is also hostile and unpredictable.

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil.

I have spent seventy years finding out that I am not God.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.

That might sound shocking to some - and don't worry, I don't see myself as a king.

God in his wisdom circumscribed man's vision, and rightly too, for otherwise man's conceit would know no bounds.

I never think about awards or anything like that when I do a job. I was first named a best actor when I was 12 years old and it doesn't really mean anything when you get down to it, because there is no best. I don't get all that involved. My chest puffs up as much as I can puff it up but I am not trying to be better than the person I am acting with. I am trying to be at least as good. That's how it works.

I've found that South Africa has produced good leaders. These are people who realize that when there is danger, they should be in the forefront and when there is victory to be celebrated, they should be in the background, allowing their colleagues and the ordinary civilians - the man in the street - to rejoice and to celebrate that victory.

I know I'm a million times as humble as thou art!

I don't think I'm like Shakespeare.

You don't impress the officials at NASA with a paper airplane. You don't boast about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Einstein because you can write 'H20.' And you don't boast about your goodness in the presence of the Perfect.

I'm human here, people. I'm not the Dalai Lama. But I'm trying.

Without false modetsy, I don't think I have a fraction of the talent of either Bevan of Foot.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

I like myself, but I won't say I'm as handsome as the bull that kidnapped Europa.

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.