“There was no middle state. A man must be of the highest rank or live miserably.”
Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6
Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668)
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François Bernier 14
French physician and traveller 1620–1688Related quotes
On the Origin and Function of Music
Essays on Education (1861)
Nature's Nobleman (1844)
Context: Away with false fashion, so calm and so chill,
Where pleasure itself cannot please;
Away with cold breeding, that faithlessly still
Affects to be quite at its ease;
For the deepest in feeling is highest in rank,
The freest is first of the band,
Nature's own Nobleman, friendly and frank,
Is a man with his heart in his hand!
Canto III, lines 34–36 (tr. John D. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno
“Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state.”
Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: Man is not an image engraved on a silver dollar, with covetous eyes, licking lips and a diamond pin on a silver dickey. Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.
“The Abbey was the highest administrative creation of the middle ages.”
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: Every ounce of food must be brought from the mainland, or fished from the sea. All the tenants and their farms, their rents and contributions, must be looked after. No secular prince had a more serious task of administration, and none did it so well. Tenants always preferred an Abbot or Bishop for landlord. The Abbey was the highest administrative creation of the middle ages.
“Belief in an ice-cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy”
Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirstoc.html Part IV, Sect. 3 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirs4_3.html
Context: Belief in an ice-cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy; but before my eyes a grand picture was rising, and I wanted to draw it, with the thousands of details I saw in it; to use it as a key to the present distribution of floras and faunas; to open new horizons for geology and physical geography.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody's mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?
St. Petersburg Times, Florida, Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology, Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, June 21, 2009 http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1012148.ece,
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Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 144
A commentary upon the holy Bible: Job to Salomon's song (1835), p. 418.