“Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have religion; and added, let those who have not science and art have the popular faith; let them have this escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the people turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of splendor and pomp and power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life that now is--in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest to learn.”
Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural
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John Burroughs 41
American naturalist and essayist 1837–1921Related quotes

from "Granada Reports", interview by Tony Wilson, Granada TV February 1985
In interviews etc., About politics and society

"Meeting Of The All-Russia Central Executive Committee" (4 November 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/nov/04a.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 285-293.
1910s

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Novum Organum (1620)
Context: Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far....
Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.

Source: Gooyanews website, 2015 http://news.gooya.com/politics/archives/2016/03/209463.php

XVII, 2
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

Original: In arte, chi ha buon gusto, possiede una qualità fondamentale durante la realizzazione di qualsiasi opera.
Source: prevale.net