Richard Bentley Quotes

Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my readers.

I know a lot of wealthy people, and yet not many of them drive a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari! However, I also know some of poor people on the verge of bankruptcy driving Bentleys!

Misfortune, the teacher of superstition. - Attributed by Walpole to his friend, Richard Bentley.

It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.

Back in the 1920s, when Einstein first began to apply his theory to the universe itself, astronomers told him that the universe was static, neither expanding nor contracting. But Einstein found something disturbing in his equations. When he tried to solve them, the equations told him that the universe was dynamic, either expanding or contracting. (He did not realize this at the time, but this was the solution to the question asked by Richard Bentley. The universe did not collapse under gravity because the universe was expanding, overcoming the tendency to collapse.) In order to find a static universe, Einstein was forced to add a fudge factor (called the cosmological constant) into his equations. By adjusting its value by hand, he could cancel out the expansion or contraction of the universe.

She wants you back.” Her gaze held his for a half-dozen heartbeats before she broke away, increasing her pace through the lobby and into the warm air of eastern Florida in January. Richard followed her, a dozen denials and rebuttals fighting for position. “She does not.” “Ooh, good retort. Prove it.” “She needs someone to cosign her paperwork, and I’m the only one she could think of to do it. I spend time here. Hence, Palm Beach.” “She needs—” “And,” he cut in, warming to the argument, “and, the Society here is the type she feels comfortable with, anyway. A good dozen of her Patty’s Pack friends have winter homes here. I can’t see her moving to Dirt, Nebraska. Can you?” Samantha dove into the Bentley that waited at the curb and actually hesitated a moment before she unlocked the passenger door for him. “No, but I can see her in Paris or Venice or Milan or New York,” she retorted. “But like you said, you’re here. And hey, Mr. Denial, if she has her Patty’s Pack friends in town, why is it again you’re being recruited to cosign?” Richard barely had time to close his door before she peeled away from the curb. “You’re jealous,” he announced. “You’re an asshole

The American philosopher Richard Taylor once illustrated this mystery, famously and fetchingly, with the image of a man out for a stroll in the forest unaccountably coming upon a very large translucent sphere. Naturally, he would immediately be taken aback by the sheer strangeness of the thing, and would wonder how it should happen to be there. More to the point, he would certainly never be able to believe that it just happened to be there without any cause, or without any possibility of further explanation; the very idea would be absurd. But, adds Taylor, what that man has not noticed is that he might ask the same question equally well about any other thing in the woods too, a rock or a tree no less than this outlandish sphere, and fails to do so only because it rarely occurs to us to interrogate the ontological pedigrees of the things to which we are accustomed. What would provoke our curiosity about the sphere would be that it was so obviously out of place; but, as far as existence is concerned, everything is in a sense out of place. As Taylor goes on to say, the question would be no less intelligible or pertinent if we were to imagine the sphere either as expanded to the size of the universe or as contracted to the size of a grain of sand, either as existing from everlasting to everlasting or as existing for only a few seconds. It is the sheer unexpected “thereness” of the thing, devoid of any transparent rationale for the fact, that prompts our desire to understand it in terms not simply of its nature, but of its very existence.

Two months later, on June 27, we get another glimpse of Moby-Dick in the making, this time in a letter to his English publisher, Richard Bentley, to whom he expressed the hope that he would have the book done by fall. It will be, he says, “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.” In this bit of self-advertising, Melville was reverting to his old hyperbolics. The truth was less glamorous: the only ship on which he might have served as harpooneer was the Charles and Henry, on which he had lived and worked for not quite six months, from early November 1842 to mid-May 1843, and for which he had probably signed up as a boatsteerer.

It is telling that in the Dictionary he offers under ‘bristly’ this heavily edited quotation from the brilliant but erratic classicist Richard Bentley: ‘If the eye were so acute as to rival the finest microscope, the sight of our own selves would affright us; the smoothest skin would be beset with rugged scales and bristly hairs.