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comment by theadvancedapes
theadvancedapes  ·  4069 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's the single greatest sentence ever written in the English language?

By far the best sentence in the history of the English language:

    There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This is the last sentence in Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species. In one single sentence he builds a scientific and philosophical framework that would become the dominant paradigm in all of science.





user-inactivated  ·  4069 days ago  ·  link  ·  

[23:16:27] <flag> when i made the post i was going more for feats of syntactical prowess and so on

[23:16:46] <flag> the best combination of deep meaning and lyrical beauty

I wrote this on the hubski IRC about thirty seconds before I saw your post. Perfect answer as far as I'm concerned. That's a beautifully constructed sentence and also one of the most important ever written.